You’re using radars for what!?! Measuring hydrologic responses

Radars offer great potential beyond resolving cloud dynamical and microphysical processes and estimating rainfall. This presentation will show how near-field remote-sensing instruments including radars and LiDARs can be used to retrieve surface flow velocities, river stages, and a stream’s cross-sectional bathymetry. These pieces of information can be combined to produce accurate estimates of the volumetric flux of water, or streamflow. This presentation will introduce the SOMMER Messtechnik RQ-30 unit that features a 26 GHz pulsed stage radar and a continuous wave 24 GHz Doppler radar. Fourteen of these units were purchased and fielded for several months and the data from three of them were compared to collocated, conventional stream gages, showing excellent agreement (Nash Sutcliffe efficiency > 0.9). This presentation will then cover the in-house development of the PinPoint Bathymetric LiDAR. COTS components were used to integrate a 635 nm (red) laser rangefinder mounted to a servo-actuated turntable, all controlled by an Arduino-compatible microcontroller, which also performs data acquisition and transmission in real time. Results from the stream radars and LiDAR bathymetry retrievals will be shown, including a vision for their application in operations.