Ishwar Joshi

This study evaluated a cost-effective UAV-based multi-sensor approach for characterizing river corridor conditions during and after moderate floods in two mountain river corridors in Northern Utah, USA: the Logan River and Blacksmith Fork River. These study reaches included urban, rural, and agricultural areas, hydraulic structures and bridges, and fish passage structures. A DJI Matrice 300 UAV was used with two separate payloads: an AgEagle Altum-PT multispectral camera and an R3 Pro V2 two-return LiDAR system. The workflow included UAV flight planning and data collection, post-processing of the multi-spectral and LiDAR sensor data, spatial resolution and accuracy assessment, and interpretation of the resultant data. The multi-spectral post-processing produced pansharpened orthomosaics with a spatial resolution of 0.0432 m, while the UAV LiDAR produced DSM/DTM products at 0.05 m resolution. LiDAR accuracy assessment showed vertical RMSE values of approximately 0.0602 m for the Blacksmith Fork and 0.0782 m for the Logan River. The results showed that multispectral imagery and 2-band LiDAR provided a cost-effective means for detailed remote sensing with each sensor providing complementary information for flood and river corridor assessment. Multispectral imagery supported interpretation of flood extent, vegetation condition, relative turbidity, and thermal patterns, while LiDAR captured terrain and surface features such as banks, levees, floodplain surfaces, channel modifications, and structures. The integrated datasets supported maximum flood extent mapping and flood-level estimation. These datasets can support reach-scale hydraulic modeling, catchment hydrology, river corridor ecology, floodplain conditions, and real-time monitoring of floods, in addition to quantification of flood hazards or post-flood impacts for municipalities and insurers.

Regime channels are important for stable canal design and to determine river response to environmental changes, e.g., due to the construction of a dam, land use change, and climate shifts. A plethora of methods is available describing the hydraulic geometry of alluvial rivers in the regime. However, comparison of these methods using the same set of data seems lacking. In this study, we evaluate and compare four different extremal hypothesis-based regime methods, namely minimization of Froude number (MFN), maximum entropy and minimum energy dissipation rate (ME and MEDR), maximum flow efficiency (MFE), and Millar’s method, by dividing regime channel data into sand and gravel beds. The results show that for sand bed channels MFN gives a very high accuracy of prediction for regime channel width and depth. For gravel bed channels we find that MFN and ‘ME and MEDR’ give a very high accuracy of prediction for width and depth. Therefore the notion that extremal hypotheses which do not contain bank stability criteria are inappropriate for use is shown false as both MFN and ‘ME and MEDR’ lack bank stability criteria. Also, we find that bank vegetation has significant influence in the prediction of hydraulic geometry by MFN and ‘ME and MEDR’.