New Approach to Hydrologic Data Acquisition

The transition from the use of chart recorders to modern electronic methods of collecting hydrologic data is used frequently only to recover greater quantities of data from much the same types of instrumentation. Consequently, expensive and sophisticated equipment has to be used to handle and record data which originate in an inconvenient form. To take better advantage of new techniques, the form of data provided at source must be reconsidered. The criteria for any specification of source data have to be derived from the purpose of the data. There follows analysis of various purposes: one of these is to provide a system description and boundary conditions for a mathematical model. In general, specifications for these data are not so severe as to allow only one data format. A new format is presented and analyzed. A project whose data acquisition system is based on this format is then described with reference to data specification and handling.