Post 6: Slow and Steady

This week was definitely at a different pace than what we've done the past couple weeks. Dr. Meierdiercks has been at a conference so there was no field work! Not going to lie, staying inside doing computer work for four days straight is not super fun and makes time go by a little slower than usual. However, I'm trying this new thing where I find the positive aspect of certain situations I'm in. Even though I didn't get to do any field work this week, I still accomplished a lot and got some very important work done. 

So far we have data from the USGS showing us discharge and specific conductance measurements from 2002 to 2008. We have our own field equipment that's been out for about eight or nine weeks now collecting discharge and specific conductance data and next week we will go out and collect that data (yay more field work!). One parameter that could be related to discharge that we do not have a dataset for is annual rainfall. I tried finding any datasets of rainfall that could've been collected by the USGS or DEC in the Albany area considering they had these stream gauges set up and were taking discharge measurements. I looked everywhere I thought I could find such datasets on both websites and I had no luck. So guess who had the bright idea of going on a weather website, looking up each individual day from October 2002 to September 2008 and recording the amount of precipitation in Albany each day! That's right. I made six different tables for each "water year" the USGS had discharge data for, filled it with every day of that year, looked for the amount of precipitation that occurred that day, and then record that information in my table. I created a graph showing the annual mean for each water year and we should be able to relate it to the annual mean of discharge that I have. I also went through and calculated the monthly mean of precipitation for every month in every year and was able to create six separate graphs showing monthly mean. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time compiling this data. But I know that this new data will be able to help us with our project by possibly relating the two datasets and helping us explain certain phenomena that have happened in our area.

This week I also analysed our sediment samples using x-ray fluorescence (XRF) in the lab. This also took more time than I expected. However it was really interesting working in the lab with this equipment and very cool to see how it worked. I was able to collect some very important data for this project regarding sediment composition. Our target element is lead. There used to be a lead company on the Patroon Creek until 1984 and it was known that pollutants from this plant managed to get into the environment. As we all know, lead is definitely not a good thing to have in the environment. The XRF is able to tell us what heavy metals are present in a sample and how much of it is present. We had five samples and I ran each sample three times to try and get an accurate reading. In many of our samples I found several different heavy metals at varying levels. Some were at safe levels, some at rising levels, and some at levels that were too high for a healthy environment. 

Yesterday I started to work on a water quality report. Basically, I'm taking all of the data we have, from past studies that look at different aspects of the environment like soil cation exchange and macroinvertebrates to datasets that have the same parameters that we are collecting, and compiling it into one huge explanation of what the overall quality of Patroon Creek is. Soon enough we will have our own data to add to this report. Even though it isn't field work or.... some people's definition of fun, I've realized that this work is very important to our project and needs to be done. However, after a week of inside work, I am SO ready to get back out in the field to finish this project!