Measurement of river discharge should be accurate, as it is key environmental data and essential for hydrologic simulations, regardless of whether the flow is high, medium, or low. Herein, conventional methods based on velocity measurements at different depths (i.e., one-point method, two-point method, and threepoint method) are evaluated with a method using a surface velocity index and a method based on the entropy theory to estimate river discharge. All the methods were implemented to calculate the discharge of Agios Germanos River, located in Northern Greece, based on 2 years of measurement. Considering that the uncertainty in flow measurement is decreasing by increasing the number of velocity measurements points (EN ISO, 2007), in this work, the reference method is the conventional three-point method. Results show that the other two conventional methods (the one-point and the two-point) estimate the discharge with an error of about 3%, while the error of the other two methods ranges between 11 and 14%. Nevertheless, the nonconventional methods could be considered acceptable and could be used safely to minimize time and subsequently, the cost of field measurements.
In order to design a network of drainage canals, it is essential to consider the excess water from the agricultural land (overland flow) and to evaluate the characteristics of flow routing, such as the flow depths and discharges in the system of tertiary and main drainage canals of various order. In this paper models based on the Saint-Venant equations are presented, simulating the flow routing in a system of drainage canals. In these models, the lateral inflow towards tertiary drainage canals is the overland flow from adjacent fields.The Saint-Venant equations in their complete form (dynamic model) or in simplified forms, such as the diffusion wave equations (diffusion model) and the kinematic wave equations (kinematic model) are numerically solved by using the MacCormack explicit computational scheme which is a two-step predictor-corrector scheme, conditionally stable and convergent. In modeling flow through the system of drainage canals, emphasis was given to the simulation of flow at the junction points of two or more canals by applying the characteristic equations (negative and positive equations) in addition to the mass and energy conservation principles.Applications of the models for the simulation of flow within the system of drainage canals, subject to lateral inflow owing to overland flow, were also conducted in order to study the effect of various parameters of the drainage canals, on the hydrographs' formation and also on the accuracy of the diffusion and kinematic equations in predicting flow in a drainage network.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.