Yichang, China ( WASER Net)

On the afternoon of August 10, participants for the WASER/IAHR-APD/IRTCES Study Tour to the TGP visited Chinese sturgeon Research Institute and Yichang Hydrological Station.

The Chinese sturgeon is known as a living fossil as it is one of the oldest vertebrates in the world. The rare fish migrates to the Jinshajiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze, from the sea and spawns there, and when the minnows grow to about 10 cm, they migrate back to the sea some 3,000 km away. As adults, they migrate back to the upstream to their birthplace.

But the fish now faces worsening living conditions due to the environmental pollution and illegal and rampant catching.

Experts say that the number of Chinese sturgeons that swim back to the Yangtze River every year has dropped to less than 1,000, with only some 500 of them able to spawn. They warned that the fish may become extinct in 50 years if no effective measures are taken immediately.

To save the endangered species, China has set up two large bases in Hubei to breed the fish, and from 1983 to 1998, nearly 6 million Chinese sturgeon minnows were released into the Yangtze. However, their survival rate is very low, as the minnows are mostly far less than 10 cm in length and they usually fall prey to other species of fish in the river.

Yichang Hydrological Station is located on the middle reach of the Changjiang River. It is a national key flood reporting station under the management of Three Gorges Hydrology and Water Resources Survey Bureau. It has a control area of 1000, 000 square kilometers. Yichang station was established in 1946, its missions include discharge measuresment,water level gauging, suspended laod, bed load, wash load, water temperature, rainfall measurement. With the use of computers, communication satellites, the GPS, the ADCP, internet network and data transceive technologies, hydrological observation and data reporting have been marching steadily towards modernization. Currently the observed hydrological data(water level and rainfall data) at this station can be transmitted to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarter and to the Changjiang River Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarter automatically.

Nowadays for daily discharge measurement, the LS25-3A type of current-meter with GPS, ultrasonic sounder and microcomputer discharge measurement system is used for the discharge measurement. If bad weather conditions make it impossible for the current-meter to make discharge measurements, the ADCP can be used instead of the current-metere. For the suspended load measurement, the instantaneous sampler is oftern used along the measurement cross-section there are 11 suspended load measuring verticals, ususaly using the cross-section mixing method to get the mean sediment concentration.
Taking a picture with water gauge

Learning how to get hydrological data

Participants of the Study Tour Listening PPT Presentation by Ms. Niu Lanhua, Yichang Hydrological Station