Abstract
Sonar survey of shallow water bodies has challenged scientists for a long time. Although these water courses are small, still they have an increasing ecological, touristic and economical role. As maritime sonars are non-ideal tools for shallow waters, the bathymetric survey of these rivers has been taken with cross-sectional methods. Due to recent developments, interferometric surveying technology have also burst into the market of recreational-grade fish-finders. The objective of the current study was the development of a novel, complex and integrated surveying technique which is affordable, robust and applicable even at low water levels. A recreational-grade sonar system was assembled and mounted on a double-hull vessel and connected with a geodetic Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) device. We have developed a novel software which enables the bridging between a closed sonar file format and the commonly used Geographic Information System (GIS) datasets. As a result, the several month-long conventional bathymetric survey of the 146 km-long reach of the Drava River was reduced to 20 days and provided channel bathymetry of many orders of magnitude higher than the classical methods. Additionally, a large number of spatial derivatives were generated which enables the analysis of channel morphology, textural variation of channel sediments and the accurate delineation of navigational routes.
Highlights
The field of sonar technology and underwater acoustics was primarily developed for military purposes [1,2]
These applications are originated from naval research, but they have slowly emerged into the commercial environment; the primary application of the sonar systems is still closely related to the seas
From the construction of the carrier platform to the survey plan, our development approach was divided into six major steps: 1. Selecting the carrier platform, to minimize acoustic disturbances caused by the cavity and the boat engine; reduce the pitch, roll and heave movement of the hydrophones of the sonar
Summary
The field of sonar technology and underwater acoustics was primarily developed for military purposes [1,2]. Until the late 1980s, these systems were superseded by newer sonar technologies, which were suitable to survey larger areas of the seafloor and to detect reflectance, material composition and sediment properties [3,4]. These applications are originated from naval research, but they have slowly emerged into the commercial environment; the primary application of the sonar systems is still closely related to the seas. Sonars—originally developed for seafloor surveys—were professional, high precision, high value and relatively large devices and their availability and applicability were limited in shallow and/or small-scale riverine environments. From the viewpoint of riverine traffic, small water courses have low priority; no significant financial resources are available for their survey
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