Unoccupied aerial systems (UAS) have great potential to capture information about surface water bodies in rapidly changing environments or during events of interest. Under dynamic conditions—such as flooding events, intercoastal channels subject to tidal changes, or water bodies subject to significant runoff—rapidly deploying UAS equipped with tethered sensors to measure water properties can generate useful and timely data about flow and water quality conditions. This talk will present the technical design, sample resulting data, and operational considerations and limitations for deploying UAS for monitoring water bodies. Specifically, this system was designed to measure temperature, conductivity, and velocity at point locations in the water column up to approximately 0.75 m depth using a low-cost multirotor vehicle. UAS measurements were compared to handheld, ground truth sensors. To highlight operational considerations for different environments, this system was tested in canals and reservoirs in northern Utah and intercoastal channels in North Carolina. Further, we show that when combined with hydrodynamic models of the deployment site, point velocity measurements can be used to estimate conditions at other locations across the site and model domain. These results highlight the potential for UAS to act as rapidly deployable sensors for one-time measurements during events of interest or in dynamic situations when installing in situ sensors is challenging.
.jpg "Sierra Young (she/her/hers) photo")
