Monitoring Fluvial Erosion of Cohesive Materials Using the Photo-Electronic Erosion Pin Sensor in Clear Creek, IA

Fluvial erosion incites significant bridge scour and large-scale bank erosion causing estimated $1.1 billion damage in the Midwest. Conventional, manual, field monitoring methods, typically erosion pins, cross-section resurveys or terrestrial photogrammetry, used to monitor fluvial erosion rates merely provide a net change in bank surface retreat since the previous measurement. If mass wasting has occurred, the ongoing fluvial erosion would be masked. Erosion event timing, and the precise bank response to individual flow or flow hydrograph changes, is generally uncertain. Thus, a technique that automatically quantifies bank erosion on a continuous basis is needed. This study will monitor the bank response to individual flow (i.e., fluvial erosion) using the Photo-Electronic Erosion Pin (PEEP) sensors in Clear Creek Iowa. It attends to monitor a full episode of bank change, including event timings and magnitude information for specific erosion and deposition events, which can be compared to flow discharges and hydrographs. If exploited, this method can lead to more detailed analysis of bank erosion related to temporal fluctuations in the suspected hydraulic forces.