Carding Mill Valley

Question 1

Describe the collection method of velocity readings

Answer 1

• used stratified sampling to select our 10 sites along course of river
• used ping-pong ball, tape measure and stop watch
• measured 5m upstream from width reading and 5m downstream to give total of 10m

Question 2

Why was ping-ping ball used

Answer 2

Because discharge was too low to use an orange

Question 3

Describe an alternative method of velocity readings

Answer 3

Use a flow metre however, river had low discharge and velocity wasn’t significant to get a reading

Question 4

Describe the process of taking velocity readings

Answer 4

• person put ball into river at higher site and timed until reached 10m point
• repeated 3 times for 10 different sites, to calculate average velocity at each one by dividing distance by time taken, required to calculate discharge

Question 5

Explain why the use of scatter graph was appropriate

Answer 5

• used scatter graph with line of best fit to represent trend and change of velocity as we conducted data at 10 different sites moving downstream by around 2188m by site 10
• line of best fit can represent overall trend to show how velocity changes downstream, it increases although results show some anomalies

Question 6

Conclusion

Answer 6

• only went to carding mill valley once, therefore can’t be sure data we recorded is entirely accurate
• we hadn’t recorded data before, the ping pong ball could’ve been affected by wind, objects etc
• we did a ‘snapshot’ view of carding mill valley, measures won’t apply to other days

Question 7

Evaluation www

Answer 7

• methods used fairly simple to conduct
• analysis enabled us to connect set of results which enabled us to make conclusions about Changes suggested by the Brad shore model which were in line with what we might have expected by taking readings at 10 sites we were also able to use spearman rank to test strength of correlation

Question 8

Evaluation ebi

Answer 8

Water level was quite low so ping pong ball got stuck which adversely affected our results.might have been better to have sophisticated flow metre although this would have been difficult given shallowness of water