River Speed from an Airplane: A Case Study along the Tanana River, Alaska
Don’t stare—take moving pictures, they will last longer. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is developing a workflow for estimating the speed of the water flowing in a river using imagery acquired from a moving aircraft. Previous studies have, in fact, stared, by mounting cameras on quasi-stationary platforms (drone, helicopter, satellite) that hover in place while acquiring image sequences over rivers. River speed is then estimated using a technique called particle image velocimetry (PIV).