WSP12125

• File Number: 8102
• Description: Arkansas River Hydrology
• State: CO
• Basin: Arkansas
• Water Division: 2
• Date: 1/1/1997
• Author: USGS
• Title: Description of the Program Changes - 1989-97- and a User Manual for a Transit-Loss Accounting Program Applied to Fountain Creek Between Colorado Springs and the Arkansas River-Colorado
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

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Descriptions of the Program Changes (1989-97)
and a User Manual for a Transit-Loss Accounting
Program Applied to Fountain Creek Between
Colorado Springs and the Arkansas River, Colorado

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By Gerhard Kuhn, E.L. Samuels, W.D. Bemis, andR.D. Steger

Abstract

Since April 1989, a FORTRAN computer
program has been used to compute transit losses
for transmountain return flows (TRF's) in Foun-
tain Creek. The transit-loss accounting program,
which was developed as a resull of a study
completed in 1987 and is described in a previous
report, enables daily accounting of (I) the TRF's,
(2) the transit losses for the TRF's. and (3) the
native streamflow (NSF) (nontransmountain
water) in Fountain Creek between the City of
Colorado Springs (CCS) and the Arkansas River.
After 1989, a number of changes were made to
the accounting program; however, the program
and the changes never have been documented
completely. To document the accounting program,
a study was done by the U.S. Geological Survey,
in cooperation with the City of Colorado Springs,
Department of Public Utilities, and the South-
eastern Colorado Water Conservancy District
(SECWCD) to document the program changes
and the use of the Fountain Creek transit-loss
accounting program. Specifically. this report
(1) describes the computational steps and proce-
dures of the accounting program; (2) describes the
changes that were made to the program in 1991-
92 and in 1994-95; (3) provides a user manual;
and (4) documents the procedures for maintaining
the accounting program. the auxiliary programs.
and \he numerous outpul files.

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Changes to the accounting program that
were made during 1991-92 and during 1994-95
included (I) adding the capability to account for
diversion of the TRF's; (2) allowing for the input
of TRF's allocations other than at the CCS waste-
water-treatment facility; (3) incorporating an
additional streamflow-gaging station into the
program computations; and (4) adding the capa-
bility for the SECWCD to account for TRF's
derived from \he Fryingpan-Arkansas Project.
The program also was modularized 10 make it
more understandable and to make the changes
easier to implement.
To compute the estimatedquanlities ofTRF
and the associated transit losses, the accounting
program uses two sets of computations. The first
sel of computations is made between any two
adjacent gaging stations (stream-segment compu-
tations); these computations estimate the loss or
gain in NSF between the two adjacent gaging
stations, The second set of computations is made
between any two adjacent nodes (subreach
computations); the actual transit-loss computa-
tions are made in the subreach computations,
using the result from the stream-segment compu-
tations.
Use of the accounting program is simplified
through an interactive program display that has
four options used to (1) compute transit losses on
a day-to-day basis, (2) analyze different NSF
diversion alternatives, (3) recompute the transit
losses for a previous day, and (4) view or change

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Abstract

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