Remote Sensing with UAVs for Flood Modeling: A Validation with Actual Flood Records

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is steadily increasing due to their capacity to capture terrain elevation data with remarkable precision and cost-effectiveness. Nonetheless, their application for estimating water surface elevations and submerged terrain, such as channel bathymetry, remain...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Water (Basel) 2023-11, Vol.15 (21), p.3813
Main Authors: Clasing, Robert, Muñoz, Enrique, Arumí, José Luis, Parra, Víctor
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Bathymetry
Chile
cost effectiveness
Creeks & streams
Drone aircraft
Field study
Floods
Hydraulics
hydrologic models
landscapes
Landslides & mudslides
Precipitation
Remote sensing
Rivers
surface area
surveys
Topography
Unmanned aerial vehicles
water
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Summary:The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is steadily increasing due to their capacity to capture terrain elevation data with remarkable precision and cost-effectiveness. Nonetheless, their application for estimating water surface elevations and submerged terrain, such as channel bathymetry, remains constrained. Consequently, the development of a digital terrain model that relies on UAV data during low-water periods assumes a more extensive dry channel surface area, thus alleviating the information gap regarding submerged terrain. The objective of this brief report is to validate a hydraulic model for flood calculation. To this end, a 1D steady-state hydrological model of the Ñuble River based on a UAV survey in the low-water period of 2016 was constructed in HEC-RAS v.5.0.3 and compared to water surface elevation observations of the flood on 24 June 2023. The model tends to overestimate the flood, but the errors are considered tolerable for flood calculation (on average, a 10.6% depth error was obtained for a 30-year return period flood); therefore, the hydraulic model derived from remote sensing seems to be an effective alternative for the construction of hydraulic models for flood studies.
ISSN:2073-4441
2073-4441
DOI:10.3390/w15213813