Sediment management |


Satellite sediment management


HYPOS is a new toolbox that enables sediment management to be powered by satellite technology and helps hydropower planners and managers overcome the challenges posed by sedimentation


HYDROPOWER, AS THE WORLD’S largest source of renewable energy, has an essential role to play in climate change mitigation and adaptation of the energy sector1,2


Above: Figure 1: The HYdro- POwer-Suite (HYPOS) subscription portal offers hydropower managers, planners and decision-makers direct access to key hydrological and water quality parameters and assessment tools. Photo credit (c/ HYPOS Patrick De Goumoens)


The economic and ecological evaluation of hydropower developments rely on a number of environmental conditions, such as key hydrological parameters (eg reservoir storage capacity over time; reservoir life time) which are directly related to the sediment regime and sediment entrapment3


. Planning the development of new, as well as the long-


term sustainability of existing reservoirs can be severely influenced by sedimentation, making it one of the most pressing issues for managers and operators in this sector. More explicitly, reservoir sedimentation results in annual losses estimated to be 0.5-1 % of the total storage volume5


. . This loss of storage is higher than the increase in


capacity made possible through the construction of new reservoirs, making sediment mitigation measures of vital importance for increasing the lifetime and enhancing the sustainability of existing reservoirs3


.


Above: Figure 2: Highly turbid waters entering the Cahora Bassa reservoir in Mozambique, indicating sedimentation issues. (c/ EOMAP contains Copernicus data from 2020)


These factors, representing a major driver of reservoir operating costs, are defined by external environmental boundary conditions that are largely unknown during the pre-planning stage, typically due to the absence of data. In addition, for existing hydropower projects, monitoring protocols are still predominantly based on water sampling and probes at few locations, hampering the holistic evaluation of environmental conditions. Hydropower managers thus lack tools to enable impact assessments at the catchment scale, especially during the planning process when extended areas and river systems shall be investigated. The absence of these assessments can result in unexpected socio-economic, ecological and political consequences in both the short and the long-term, and cost overruns can occur due to erroneous site selection and inadequate planning4


.


Below: Figure 3: The entry point to the HYPOS toolbox (c/ HYPOS, Stucky)


Re-inventing planning and monitoring Recognising the need for innovative solutions to combat


these challenges, the EU Horizon 2020 Research and


Innovation Programme has funded the HYdro-POwer- Suite (HYPOS) project, which began in Dec 2019. HYPOS is working to fill these gaps through the development of an online accessible decision support tool (Figure 3), which enables environmental and economic investment planning and monitoring based on state-of-the-art Earth Observation (EO) technologies and hydrological modelling complemented by available on-site data. Specifically, the tool combines satellite-derived water quality parameters (eg turbidity) with key hydrological data (eg inflow-outflow volumes; discharge) that is operationally produced every day, to facilitate assessments of sediment transport and sedimentation rates within the portal. Thus, at the click of a mouse, results such as total suspended solids in the water can be depicted instantaneously for the entire catchment by the software’s algorithms, provided satellite data is available. The HYPOS consortium is comprised of five sectoral industry and innovation leaders in the fields of: ● Aquatic EO (EOMAP, Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment|CNR IREA).


● Hydrological modelling (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute|SMHI).


● On-site data (Norwegian University of Science and Technology|NTNU).


● Hydropower engineering (STUCKY Ltd.). The project is led by EOMAP, a global specialist on satellite-based aquatic services from Germany. Together they form the optimal basis for developing this tool, which utilises distributed cloud computing infrastructures and full automation in scalable IT concepts that will enable the scalability and cost efficiency of data generation.


Quick and easy access To help hydropower managers, planners and decision-


makers build a more accurate and comprehensive picture of their reservoir, the HYPOS solution aims to provide easy access to key hydrological and water quality parameters for selectable time periods, covering actual, recent seasonal or historic data on demand. This will further enable the estimation of key dynamic trends at larger timescales, including long-term statistics of relevance (eg high/low monthly flows, etc, calculated using the HYPE model6


), along with daily updates for


essential hydrological variables (eg discharge, soil moisture, etc.) which may otherwise not be available. Additional advantages of the HYPOS solution include access to spatially explicit data, continuous measurements (every several days for EO data, depending on cloud coverage; daily updates for modelled flow and sediment concentrations), and significantly lower costs than field campaigns. The absence of such data currently introduces major opportunities for cost optimisations and improved


26 | January 2022 | www.waterpowermagazine.com


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