How to model water flow when only a couple of sample points available?

How to model waterflow when only a couple of sample points available

• Figure below depicts a cross section of a creek for which I am trying to measure the water flow for that section. What we have as inputs are a bunch of sample points on the river. For each sample points we measured the depth of creek at that point (e.g. h1, etc) the velocity of water at that point(e.g. v1) and the distance of that sample point from the shore. For each area the water flow is defined as the multiplication of area times the velocity. Since we are given the h1,..hn and d1 ,.. dn we can easily measure each area thereby the water flow of that section. areaFlow1 = [(v1+v2)/2][(h1+h2)/2][(d2-d1)] However what I need to know here is how to aggregate all of those multiple area water flows to define the global water flow for that section? Is it the best to say Global Water Flow ( for a cross section) = Sigma(areaFlow(1)..areaFlow(n))/ n ?

• Answer:

  I'm not a river-ologist but you may want to account for the depth at which you've measured the velocity. http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/152.mf1i.spring02/RiverViscosity.htm