Reservoir monitoring using a multi-phase echo sounder: A case study

The monitoring of reservoirs presents three major challenges: accessibility to the spatially complex shallow water shoreline, the natural intra-annual, inter-annual and decadal temporal dynamics; and the large spatial extent. These challenges render the acquisition of useful geospatial/geophysical information costly and inefficient. Temporal variations in hydrology caused by natural meteorological events constantly impact the infrastructure and surrounding landscape of the reservoir system. In order to effectively monitor and evaluate these patterns of change and better understand the impact of contributing environmental factors, engineers and scientists need access to current geospatial/geophysical survey data. Historically, access to survey data at the spatial and temporal scale required to effectively monitor and evaluate the integrity of the reservoir system has been plagued by long acquisition time and high costs. The utilization of the latest developments in swath bathymetry and an innovative acquisition approach proposes to overcome this cost barrier. The EdgeTech 6205 is the first of its kind to employ the new Multi-Phase Echo Sounding (MPES) technique to simultaneously acquire high quality bathymetry data along with dual frequency side scan imagery at much longer ranges than traditional systems. The wider swath coverage allows for fewer sweeps across the survey area and reduces the processing time to co-register the imagery to the three-dimensional (3D) bathymetric point data. This case study evaluates the efficacy and affordability of exploiting the latest MPES technology in shallow-water survey systems.