Remote sensing of river flow using uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and satellite platforms

The occurrence of flooding in western Europe is predicted to increase throughout the first half of the 21st Century. These events pose severe risks to society, transform communities, and under extreme conditions can permanently alter the state of the river system. Measurement and monitoring of these events are hindered by practical difficulties, making observations of peak flood discharge in many environments a significant technological and logistical challenge.
Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and satellite platforms have the potential to capture information about the earth's surface in dangerous and previously inaccessible locations. Through image and video acquisition of flood events and subsequent image-based analysis, highly dynamic and oftimmeasurable hydraulic phenomena may be quantified at previously unattainable spatial and temporal resolutions. This project seeks to push the current state-of-the-art in remote sensing of rivers through the utilisation of planned deployments using UAS, and opportunistic/tasked sensing of river flows using image sequences acquired by high-resolution satellite platforms."