Snow depth and water equivalent retrieval with UAV photogrammetry: toward an operational procedure for Arctic tundra watersheds

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Iqaluit-based Arctic UAV Inc. provides Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight and image acquisition services for a wide variety of applications in Arctic environments and communities, including land surveying, photogrammetry, search and rescue, site inspections and wildlife surveys. The proposed project aims to develop and test snow mapping methodologies based on UAV photogrammetry in Arctic tundra environments. The overarching objective is to develop and test a workflow for operational retrieval of snow depth and snow water equivalent including accuracies of the derived mapping products and to allow Arctic UAV Inc. to incorporate this into their suite of business services. The work leverages existing snow science activities and watershed modelling research near Iqaluit. UAV imagery will be used to generate dense 3-dimensional point clouds of surface topography during snow-covered and snow-free conditions in order to calculate high-resolution snow distribution maps. Snow depth will be converted to snow water equivalent using the field and model-derived estimates of density. Accuracies of the mapping products will be determined based on field measurements, and a protocol for estimating accuracies without the use of field measurements will be developed to advance Arctic UAV Inc.'s ability to incorporate the proposed methodologies into beyond visual line of site (BVLOS) UAV applications using long endurance aircraft. BVLOS snow surveying is a strategic area for research and development since many northern hydropower utilities require timely and accurate estimates of landscape snow water equivalent over large, remote regions of Canada.