Our research project is centered on observing how soil moisture at Spelman College changes over different seasons and different weather conditions. We plan to quantify the effects of changes in local weather conditions on soil hydrological processes and parameters. We hypothesize that extreme weather conditions will have an impact on soil moisture conditions and ultimately flooding potential. If there is more soil moisture, then there is an increased potential of flooding due to short and long term weather conditions. Daily local weather data will be collected using a weather station, and soil moisture data will be collected using a Lysimeter. Both of these instruments are housed in the Environmental Science lab at Spelman College. Furthermore, we will utilize several statistical methods as well as visualization tools like ArcGIS to analyze data and present results.
