Cold-regions river flow using a cubesat constellation
Abstract
Knowledge of water-surface velocities in rivers is useful for understanding a wide range of processes. In cold regions, river-ice break up and the associated downstream transport of ice debris is often the most important hydrological event of the year, producing exceptional flood levels and dramatic consequences for river infrastructure and ecology. Also river freeze-up causes an array of impacts on the river system. Quantification of river surface velocity from remote sensing rarely covers entire river reaches, and accurate and complete surface-velocity fields on rivers have rarely been produced. In this study, we track river-ice debris over entire river reaches and over a time period of about one and a half minutes, which is the typical time lapse between the image ground swaths of subsequent cubesats of the Planet Dove constellation. This constellation consists of more than 150 free-flying micro-satellites, mostly in near-polar orbit. The instruments carry frame cameras that image the Earth surface in nadir direction with resolutions of around 3 m, and about 25-30 km swath width. The constellation is able to image the entire land surface at least once per day. This is accomplished by letting the satellites follow each other in the same orbit with a time delay so that Earth rotation causes latitudinal displacement between the subsequent ground swaths to cover the complete Earth surface, and leading to the near-simultaneous cross-track overlap exploited in this study. Here, we demonstrate and evaluate the potential of the Planet cubesat constellation to measure river surface velocities systematically and over large areas. We assess the accuracy of the velocity fields obtained, and exemplify results for different river conditions and application scenarios. Finally, we explore the possibility of combining such-derived horizontal water surface velocities with repeat satellite-altimetric river stage measurements in order to estimate river discharge from space.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H21E..03K
- Keywords:
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- 1819 Geographic Information Systems (GIS);
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1855 Remote sensing;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1856 River channels;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1857 Reservoirs (surface);
- HYDROLOGY