Estimating the Average River Cross‐Section Velocity by Observing Only One Surface Velocity Value and Calibrating the Entropic Parameter

Abstract

Protecting and managing the waterways are of particular consequence in maintaining the balance between nature and human civilization. In this regard, river monitoring is one of the utmost issues in the field of river engineering due to (a) decision-making related to the protection of life and property from water-related hazards, such as floods, and (b) cost-effective management of freshwater that is safe and available for some applications, such as drinking, irrigation, energy, industry, recreation, and ecosystem health. Consequently, new technologies and methodologies are of particular importance to monitoring discharge rate considering various flow conditions at river gauges to improve the understanding of the surface hydrologic processes at the catchment scale (Tauro et al., 2014). Noncontact methods have been applied recently to measure flow properties, such as Doppler (velocity) radars (

Uncrewed Aerial Systems in Water Resource Management and Monitoring: A Review of Sensors, Applications, Software, and Issues

“…UAVs have been used to measure fow velocity. UASacquired images have been used in many studies to derive surface velocity [47,47,126,127,132,133,137,180]. Te studies mainly focused on evaluating the technique.…”

Radar Technology for River Flow Monitoring: Assessment of the Current Status and Future Challenges

“…The estimation of river flow is the last step after obtaining the river surface velocity from the signal spectrum. Traditional flow calculation methods usually involve obtaining the depth-averaged velocity or the cross-section average velocity and calculating the flow rate based on the velocity-area method [77]. However, since radar can only measure the flow velocity at a specific place or a small area on the river surface, it is necessary to solve the problem of how to accurately calculate the cross-section flow from the surface velocity [78].…”

Advancing hydrological monitoring using image-based techniques: challenges and opportunities

“…One straightforward method involves deriving depth-averaged velocity with correction parameters, subsequently applying the velocity-area method (Hauet et al, 2008;Detert et al, 2017). Alternatively, the entropy model reconstructs flow velocity profiles (Bahmanpouri et al, 2022), utilizing known conditions like surface velocity to accurately estimate average water flow speed (Moramarco et al, 2013). A more recent approach uses river wave patterns to directly estimate discharge, without the need for cross-section measurements or velocity data, solely relying on physical principles (Dolcetti et al, 2022).…”