Who we serve · Irrigation districts and canal companies
For irrigation districts and canal companies.
Districts and canal companies already know the system loses water. The work is deciding which reach to spend on, and locating the loss well enough to scope a repair. Then proving afterwards that the repair worked.
02 · What is at stake
The system loses water every season. The question is which reach to spend on.
A district can measure that loss is happening and still not know where. Locating it turns a lining budget into a decision the board can minute. It turns a repair into something you can show worked.
03 · The section
Five places a reach loses water, and what each one is visible from.
The plate is a schematic section, stamped as one. It carries no station, no dimension and no measurement. The annotations name parts of an embankment, not findings on any particular reach.
- FROM THE CREST
- FLOW SECTION
- POROUS STRATUM
- SEEPAGE PATH
- OUTBOARD TOE
01 / 05 Canal embankment
-
01
What the ditch rider can reach
You can see water leaving. You cannot see where it went in.
A reach gets walked and driven from the crest all season. The crest is the one place the loss is invisible from. What shows up there is the symptom: a damp toe, a soft shoulder, a patch that stays green. It appears long after the water left the prism.
-
02
What a flow check settles
Inflow and outflow bound the loss. They do not locate it.
A flow measurement at each end of a reach tells the board how much water goes missing between two points. It is a real number, and the right instrument for the question it answers. But a reach is miles long. The number is the same whether the loss is one bad quarter-mile or spread evenly.
-
03
Why this reach and not the next one
Some ground was never going to hold water.
Where the section was cut through porous ground, the bed leaks because of what is under it. Nothing has gone wrong. Districts know which reaches these are in general terms. What they do not have is the boundary: where the porous run starts and stops. That is exactly what decides how much liner to buy.
-
04
What happens inside the bank
The path through the embankment is the part nobody has seen.
Water leaving the prism travels through the bank before it appears anywhere. That path is why a wet spot on the outboard side is rarely opposite the place the water left. It is also why patching where the damp shows up so often fails to stop it.
-
05
Where the flight actually reads
It daylights at the toe, and at dawn the toe is a different temperature.
Saturated ground holds heat differently from the dry ground beside it, and before sunrise that difference is at its widest. A radiometric pass flown then indicates where along the reach the embankment is wet. Probable seepage, located, ready for the ground check that confirms it.
04 · From guesswork to measurement
What the district already knows, and what the flight adds.
What the district knows
What the flight adds
It’s really hard to quantify how much is really leaking out there
- Probable seepage located by station and offset along the reach, ranked so the worst of it is obvious.
- Engineering estimates and years of field observation carry the grant application. The after-report is built from a different record than the before.
- A baseline you can re-fly, so the application and the verification read from the same document.
areas of constant observation
- An annual re-flight that catches a bank saturating before it moves.
05 · What you receive
What lands in your hands.
- 01 Stationed hotspot map Every candidate located by station and offset along the reach, ready to hand to a ditch rider. PDF + KMZ
- 02 ΔT table Each anomaly ranked by thermal difference, with a ground-verification flag against it. Located by canal name and station, plus coordinates. CSV + GeoPackage
- 03 Thermal and visible orthomosaics The same reach in both bands, from the same flight over the same ground. GeoTIFF
- 04 Photogrammetric surface model Bank and channel geometry, for cross-sections and for comparison against the next flight. DSM + LAZ
- 05 Method report Conditions on the day, emissivity and reflected-temperature settings, and the limits of the result. PDF
What the flight settles, and what it does not
Thermography indicates where the embankment is wet. It is not a flow measurement and does not replace one. A flow measurement still quantifies what a reach loses, and a ground check still confirms what a candidate is. Nor is any output a land survey. Boundary determinations and certified elevations are performed by a licensed Idaho professional land surveyor. We are the aerial capture inside that arrangement, not a substitute for it.
Questions we are asked
Notes.
Q1 Do you work with canal companies as well as districts?
Both. A canal company is privately held by its shareholders. An irrigation district is a public entity under Title 43. The flight and the deliverable are the same either way. What differs is who holds the easement and signs the written authorization. That is settled when we quote.
Q2 How long a reach can you fly in one morning?
Reach length is set when we quote, against the dawn window. The window is the constraint, not the flying. A flight is planned so the whole reach is captured while the thermal contrast holds. A longer system is broken into reaches flown on consecutive mornings.
Q3 When in the season should we fly?
The seepage flight needs water in the canal and the contrast of first light. That puts it between spring and fall. The dry-channel model that pairs with it is flown after the canal is drained, in late fall or winter. Districts running both get them on that natural cycle.
Q4 Will locating seepage push us toward lining the whole system?
The flight does not argue for lining. It shows where loss is concentrated so whatever you decide is decided on located evidence. Seepage in some reaches recharges the aquifer. That trade-off is a policy question for the district, its water users and the state. A thermal camera does not settle it.
Q5 Can the board read it?
That is what the report is written for. Findings are numbered, located by station, ranked, and summarized so a board can work through them in a few minutes. The technical detail sits behind it: settings, conditions, limitations, for the engineer who wants to check the work.
07 · Where this goes next
- Canal seepage thermography The dawn radiometric flight, its standards and its full deliverable set.
- Mapping & 3D modeling Dry-channel orthomosaic and surface model of the same reach, for cross-sections and comparison.
- Locate canal seepage before you line The decision page: how the flight ranks reaches and what it settles.
- General contractors, owners and lenders Dated, registered documentation of what is in place, and what it was before it was covered.
- Facility and plant management Electrical thermography against NFPA 70B, and the roof over the plant.
- Property and CRE management Roof condition across a portfolio, keyed by building and comparable year over year.
- Food, dairy and agricultural processing Electrical under load, planned around your food-safety program and production.
Next step · One reach
Start with the reach you already suspect.
A short call sizes the reach, fixes the dawn window, and settles what ground verification your ditch riders will do.
We reply within one business day.