Remote Sensing of Visible Dye Concentrations During a Tracer Experiment on a Large, Turbid River

Abstract

The motion of a small organism, a contaminant, or any other suspended or dissolved constituent through a river system is influenced by the spatial organization of the flow field. Understanding how materials are redistributed by various dispersion processes is thus critical for a broad range of applications. For example, numerical dispersion models are often used to simulate the spread of pollutants and other dangerous substances. This approach can inform disaster response by predicting how a spill of oil or hazardous waste will spread along and across a river, providing travel time estimates, and highlighting locations where contaminants might accumulate and pose a persistent environmental hazard. This kind of information is critical for emergency management agencies tasked with issuing public health advisories and leading containment and remediation activities following a spill (e.g., Nelson et al., 2018;Seo et al., 2016). Similarly, in a biological context, characterizing the onset, growth, and movement of harmful algal blooms could yield insight regarding their adverse effects on aquatic ecosystems and human health (e.g., Brooks et al., 2016;Burford et al., 2020). This study was designed to support ongoing efforts

Turbulence near a sandbar island in the lower Missouri River

“…Presently, the channel width in the study reach is about 400 m and the water surface slope is 0.00018 (Legleiter et al, 2022). Mean annual discharge at the site is approximately 1600 m 3 /s (USGS gaging station 06909000 at Boonville, MO); discharge on September 16, 2021, was 1300 m 3 /s, or 69% daily flow exceedance.…”

“…Presently, the channel width in the study reach is about 400 m and the water surface slope is 0.00018 (Legleiter et al, 2022).…”

Improvement of the Two-Dimensional Routing Procedure for Observing Dispersion Coefficients in Open-Channel Flow

“…Therefore, applying FCA into Equation ( 19) is necessary to estimate the spatial distribution from the temporal distribution. Equation ( 19) can be converted into the temporal routing method by applying Equations ( 20) to (23).…”

“…However, the spatial distributions were subjectively estimated through human color recognition and were used to comprehend contaminant transport in natural streams. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used to monitor river environments [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Flynn and Chapra (2014) [17] suggested the method for remotely sensing the spatial distribution of submerged aquatic vegetation using the UAVs.…”