CoAuthors

Guillaume Valladeau (CLS, France); Pierre Prandi (CLS, France); Olivier Lauret (CLS, France)

HyDrones (https://hydrones.cls.fr) is a new service which relies on the complementarity between flying UAVs and autonomous payloads, aiming to monitor continental water bodies, estuaries and coastal zones. Taking the advantage of UAV versatility and fast deployment capabilities, the solution is based on innovative instruments capable of performing high resolution and real-time measurements of hydrological areas through the monitoring of its main parameters such as water surface height (WSH), bathymetry, extent and surface velocity. Moreover, HyDrones instruments are designed to provide a cost-effective solutions that can be easily and rapidly deployed on the end-users’ areas of interest. Thus, on-demand fast data acquisition is possible, as well as offline long term monitoring.

In this study, the performances of the HyDrones #MK1.1 light altimeter instrument dedicated to WSH are presented and compared to other measurement systems such as the CalNaGeo GNSS carpet during a 260 km length experiment over the Seine river. In addition, in the frame of Cal/Val in-situ activities dedicated to hydrology, HyDrones WSH time series are also compared to Jason-3 data on the Garonne river close to Marmande (South of France). Finally, the first results of the HyDrones #MK2 light bathymeter solution are presented for different hydrological contexts, aiming to provide an end-to-end/all-in-one Cal/Val in-situ solution for the future altimeter missions over continental water bodies.