Rally ho! River Rally on the Mississippi 2013

JM, Jim and Nathan, LRRD fabricators/prototypers, at River Rally 2013. 

Nathan, Jim, JM and I spent last weekend exhibiting our Em2 at the River Network's annual River Rally.

We met people from all over the country who are dedicated to river conservation - a pretty regular thing in this business.  But this meeting, held in downtown St. Louis on the edge of the Mississippi River, was special for us.

All four of us grew up in Missouri or Illinois, in the Mississippi watershed.  In Carbondale, Ill., our home, we can drive a half hour and dip our toes into the Mississippi.

So we were thrilled to meet so many people who are working to protect the river in our own back yard, like the crew from Living Lands & Waters, who spend most of their days on a barge traveling the Mississippi, picking up trash and planting trees.  (Nathan will attend one of their environmental educator workshops next month.)

A main event on Monday included the mayors of St. Louis, Grafton, Ill., and Wickliff, Ky. -- all nearby towns to Carbondale -- who gathered  at River Rally for a panel discussion about the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, a cooperative among mayors all along the river.  The mayors aim to approach river policy as a group, rather than as individual cities and towns (read an article from the Quad City Times about the initiative here).

During the discussion, the three mayors talked about the trouble with building and farming in floodplains (Wickliff is just a few miles away from Cairo, Ill., which we blogged about extensively during the big spring flood of 2011), and controlling Asian Carp, an invasive species that has infested the Mississippi (watch a short video about Asian Carp here).

These are issues the folks at River Rally have been talking about probably since River Network began 25 years ago (yep, it's a milestone year for them), and will continue to talk about in the years to come.

Nathan talks with a visitor at River Rally 2013 in St. Louis

LRRD at EGU Vienna.

Meriam prepares to welcome visitors after setting up the booth

 Our Meriam is back from Vienna, Austria, where she and Beth Fisher displayed our Em2 at the European Geosciences Union annual General Assembly.

Over ten thousand scientists, from 95 countries, attended the meeting.



Meriam visited with some old friends, like Dr. Guido Zolezzi (pictured below), and made many new ones.

A special thank you to Sebastien Castelltort, who invited Meriam to speak during a pop-up session at the Steepest Descent workshop about our color-coded-by-size modeling media. 

Dr. Guido Zolezzi (left, in red) visits the LRRD booth at EGU

Hot body velocimetry. Blow on your finger.

Emflume instrumentation entertainment. from Steve Gough on Vimeo.


Wet your finger.  Blow on it.  You can sense the cooling.

Try it with a dry finger.  You'll probably sense that, too.  Feel the cooling?

Your body works to maintain 37 °C .   Air moving past it at a lower temperature cools it, that's why you sense the cooling of your finger.

Science lit is full of "thermal anemometry"  papers, and you can buy instruments that measure airspeed this way -- a body, usually very small, is heated to a constant temperature, and the power needed to do that is a measure of fluid velocity past it.

I'm calling our work "hot body velocimetry" because there isn't a name for it in the lit, not for water.

We need to measure velocity in our new Emflume, and in our Emriver models.

Getting bloodless instruments to work as well as fingers is not so easy.  Stick your finger in moving water and you'll see.

EGU 2013, more dots on the map, thermal velocimetry.

Meriam at EGU in Vienna last week

Jim, Lily, and Nathan load three Em2 geomodels today

Our Meriam is back from EGU 2013, where she respresented us in her four languages.  She's jet-lagged and exhausted, but bears lots of good news.

Three Em2 models left this afternoon; off to do good things, way more than dots on a map to us.

Jim and I continued work on a thermal velocimeter for our models.  A nifty concept used a lot for air.  Not so easy to apply in water.

I should let this concept go for something simpler, but the physical interactions; thermodynamics, electronics, fluid mechanics, are fascinating.

Notes in instruments for thermal velocimeter R&D

Power-resistance curves for thermistors we're testing

A thermistor being tested in the flume.

Happiness at LRRD.

Today Jim and I made a thermal velocimeter work in our new Emflume. Many hours of work, and a science first.


Lily looked great in her Thai silk tie, busy talking to clients all day.  She was happy to see purchase orders for two Em2 models last Friday.


John Micheal prepped two more Em2s for shipment. We shipped three last week.


And today I made a rack to hold the fifty or so prototyping tools I use most.

A happy day for me.

And we have a booth here this week.  More on that later.

Drag body rig is anything but.

March 26 Emflume drag body velocimeter development. from Steve Gough on Vimeo.

A few times each year I have an exciting, emotional day in the lab.

When I realize I've done something that will make the world a better place. 

Watch the movie.  I loved building this drag body velocimeter and playing with it.  I can't imagine a better way for students to get a hands-on, physical, visual understanding of how moving water works.

After more work, we'll ship this worldwide, and thousands of students will use this simple, inexpensive, elegant device to love and enjoy learning like I did this week.

AWRA Spring Specialty Conference 2013

A group of visitors surround the Em2 during the networking reception Monday night.

 Nathan and I hauled an Emriver into downtown St. Louis Sunday -- in the middle of a record-setting spring snow storm that brought more than 12 inches to the area -- to exhibit at the American Water Resources Association 2013 Spring Specialty Conference.

Two of the nine scheduled exhibitors didn't make it due to canceled flights.  An already low turnout -- budget cuts forced US federal agency representatives to cancel weeks before the conference -- was even lower.

But we've had a great meeting.  We've met students and professors, state agency representatives, and professionals young and old.  We even met a young scientist -- a professor's ten-year-old daughter -- who spent some time with us last night armoring stream banks in our model.

A meeting organizer told me at the cocktail reception last night that we're the talk of the conference.

"What's cool is, even the old white guys are talking about you," he added.

This conference's theme is agricultural hydrology and water quality, so we've talked a lot about management practices related to farming, especially pollution.  By lunchtime, the water in our Em2 runs a deep emerald green from all the dye we've been using to simulate contaminants.

We've made new connections and visited with old friends.  We're especially glad to see our friends from SIU, who helped organize and sponsor the meeting.

Nathan talks about simulating flood hyrdrographs with a conference attendee.