Standing out from the crowd

The Man and I made it down to Five Rivers this evening, and there it was, as lovely as usual. 

We chose the Vlomankill trail, and stopped to look at the stream-level measuring station at the first wooden bridge.  It's a "CrowdHydrology" initiative.  You read the measurement, then text it to a website that records the measurements over time and thus tracks the rise and fall of the stream.  We duly took today's reading (0.7 feet - pretty low, but still a nice enough flow) and the Man texted it in.

Here's a photo (from our archive) of the stream in winter at the measuring point:

When the Man visited the website he identified that at some point someone had (presumably by mistake?) recorded a measurement of 32 feet (a Noah's flood situation), which had thrown all calculations off by a crazy margin.  That is the risk with crowd-sourced science projects, I suppose.