Monitoring Water Temperature

Hi Folks, 

 

We are looking to map water surface temperature along a 0.5 mile river reach. We’d like to using our existing Phantom 4 Pro setup with the appropriate sensor. Relative temperature values are fine. Anyone have experience with a particular senor and/or workflow? Going to process in Pix4D.

Hello Joe,

You can find a lot of information on how to process thermal images in this article here.

The supported sensors are listed too.

Regards.

Hey Joe. There will also likely be issues with calibration and matching since water poses an inherent difficulty for photogrammetry since it is reflective and dynamic. Flying high may help images to calibrate. Whether the images will be able to calibrate will also depend on the conditions of the river (sun angle, flow, turbidity, etc). 

Thanks, Daniel and Holden! We will take these limitations into consideration. It is my understanding that the emissivity / reflective characteristics of water can challenge the reliability of thermal sensing. Do anyone in the community have first hand experience? Essentially, we are attempting to map cold water up-welling (groundwater mixing) in the surface water.