Author Archives: Laura Toran

This month saw a lot of projects for the Geopath project to help students enhance their preparation for careers: college approval of a new HAZWOPER course and associated certificate first set of internship applications sent to employers career night where … Continue reading →

Dr. Rob Rossi, PhD from University of Pittsburgh, arrived March 13 (just in time for that snow day mentioned in the previous post).  He is working with Rob Ryan and me on modeling and monitoring in the Wissahickon and at … Continue reading →

Over spring break we were supposed to do hormone sampling in Valley Creek Springs, install data loggers on the Wissahickon, put the ISCO samplers back out in Central PA , and do an infiltration test at the science building (SERC) … Continue reading →

I am meeting with a couple of undergraduates this semester for independent studies. Rachel Crowly is reading papers about contamination in karst systems, and will follow up with some sampling of local springs.  Trevor Murray is reading about groundwater-surface water … Continue reading →

We pulled our urban monitoring data loggers  and karst spring ISCO samplers to keep them from freezing over the winter and do some calibration.  Looking at all of the data we collected inspired us to write up some of the … Continue reading →

After a month of meetings with sponsors and regulators to keep the urban hydrology research funded, it was nice to spend some time in the lab teaching this year’s hydro class about solute transport and dispersion. We conducted a tracer … Continue reading →

Grad student Jim Berglund and I are reviewing the groundwater model FEFLOW for use in his PhD research.  We are looking for a code that does flow and transport in conduits, and FEFLOW has the added bonus of allowing heat … Continue reading →

I installed my first wireless logger to replace a broken weather station logger at Temple Ambler.  Now the data can be checked online!  The URL is https://www.hobolink.com/p/5d3befc35fa8777268a5cd604b62564c Help from IT at Temple Ambler was much appreciated during the set up.

I set up stormwater samplers at the College Settlement site in the headwaters of the Pennypack.  The samplers are above and below a large retention basin that captures runoff from neighborhoods along Welsh Road.  Villanova has extensive water budget monitoring … Continue reading →

We repeated our longitudinal sampling in the Wissahickon from the headwaters to the Philly border.  Postdoc Sarah Ledford organized five of us to sample different segments and we met to collect samples in the center of the watershed within 15 … Continue reading →