An exercise on the effects of flooding that took place in the upper Mississippi River drainage basin in 1993, using before and after satellite images.

This U.S. Geological Survey report describes the natural and anthropogenic factors believed to influence water quality in the Yellowstone River Basin. Topics include physiography, climate, geology, vegetation, surface water, stream ecology, groundwater, anthropogenic factors, integrated environmental settings, and others. Text is supported by numerous maps, graphs, charts, diagrams, and tables.

Students calculate recurrence intervals for various degrees of flooding based on historical data. Students then do a risk assessment for the surrounding community.

In this several week-long introductory geoscience project, students evaluate the potential for flooding in the local region. Students visit the site during the first week of the semester as part of a "Walk in the Watershed" and make observations in order to generate hypotheses about the processes that shape the landscape and control the movement of water. During a later lab period, students return to the same site to determine stream discharge using the flotation and current meter methods and compare and contrast the results from the two methods. In addition, students in the different laboratory sections use their data to compare and contrast reasons for why discharge may have changed over the course of the day or week during the following class meeting. As an in-class exercise, students examine an annual hydrograph and then predict the weather that generated the observed stream discharge. Students test their hypotheses by analyzing precipitation data available on-line in order to correlate flood events with storm types or other causes for major discharge events. Next, students examine historical flood and discharge data of the local stream available on-line at http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/ as a homework assignment. In addition to calculating the recurrence interval and probability of occurrence for each event, students determine the discharge and stage of a 1-, 10-, 50-, and 100-year flood, create a rating curve, and generate a floodway map for each of these events. Subsequently, students revisit the site during lab and locate the boundaries of these flood events. Students will make recommendations for building a house in the region based on their analyses.

In this lab, students make a flood hazard map for the city of St. Peter, MN.

This exercise looks at the dollar losses and deaths caused by flooding in the US, and at the causes of, and relationships between the two trends.

This website provides a fieldtrip guide to the levee breaks in and around New Orleans.

The four exercises give students an opportunity to use their knowledge of graphs, algebra, and maps to solve simple geological problems.

An activity/lab where students determine the changes in 100-year flood determinations for 2 streams over time.

Students use spreadsheets to analyze the reasons why New Orleans has subsided in the past 250 years.