Hydrones- Hydrosystem drone surveying

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Philipp Thumser, Christian Haas, Jeffrey A. Tuhtan, Matthias Schneider

Friday 3 july 2015

14:45 - 15:00h at North America (level 0)

Themes: (T) Hydro-environment, (ST) Ecohydraulics and ecohydrology

Parallel session: 16F. Environment - Ecohydraulic

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Civilian applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly growing. The most common scientific uses are in the fields of archaeology, geography, mining, and civil engineering. The mapping of hydrosystems using UAVs is both lean and agile, with the added advantage of increased safety for the surveying crew. This work proposes that environmental intelligence gathered using remote sensing and ground-based observations coupled with numerical simulations can be applied to concomitantly increase the scope and penetration of scientific surveillance, and can lead to new opportunities to detect, track, and quantify complex environmental interactions across a wide spectrum of events. Applications of such an integrated workflow in current research and engineering projects are presented on examples of rivers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. UAV imagery from high resolution cameras, high precision GPS and NIR camera, a 2D hydrodynamic model, and terrestrial observations can now be combined in a single workflow. Future applications in this field will enhance data quality and quantity, as well as the spectrum of data with negligibly additional expenses in equipment and time. It is thus expected that the use and range of applications of UAVs in the hydrosciences will act as a force multiplier for both scientific uses and engineering projects.