Installation, the hard work...

Wednesday (30 May) we took our hired cars and cruised around in our research catchments to find good spots to place our raingauges, water level loggers, weather station, etc. It was a really wet day and all the Portuguese we talked to told us that this was exceptional... Good to know but we were still soaked at the end of the day.


The next day we installed our discharge measurement station, Great fun hammering away and getting wet... We also measured the discharge of the river. The girls were suffering from hay fever and could be heard sneezing the whole day. Fortunately, the rain was gone...


We decided to use some of the boreholes that the students had placed the year before and Maarten took us to the spot and managed to find the groundwater tube that was well hidden now in the grass. The GPS was only a few meters off, and your head is a great place to put the receiver.

We picked a spot for the weather station and we made a borehole. It was heavy clay and no water came in at all. Very dissapointing!

On Saturday we got round to doing the meteorology. This took us all morning and we had to skip lunch as well. Lots of attention from passing farmers on small tractors, who laughed at us for drilling a hole in an area that was well known not to give any water. Well, they proved to be wrong and we did find some water in our newly drilled borehole today.



Posted by Maarten Waterloo