Illustration For irrigation districts · Idaho & the Intermountain West
Canal seepage thermography is aerial seepage detection for irrigation districts and canal companies. A dawn flight along the reach locates probable seepage by station and offset, ranked and flagged for a ground check. You receive a stationed hotspot map, a ΔT table and a repeatable baseline.
Stakes
Knowing the canal leaks is not the problem. Knowing which reach is.
Districts already fund lining work. The hard part is deciding where to spend it. That means locating the loss precisely enough to scope a repair, then proving afterwards that the repair held. A reach chosen wrong is a season of budget spent on ground that was never the worst of it.
Visible light to thermal · same reach, same frame
The same passes build a photogrammetric model of the reach — the baseline every later flight is measured against.
Illustrative values, accompanying the schematic above. Real capture replaces them. Focus or hover a row to light the matching callout on the frame.
| ID | Station | ΔT °C | Severity | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ANOM-03 | 26+40 | 4.2 | High | Verify on ground |
| ANOM-01 | 14+20 | 3.1 | Moderate | Verify on ground |
| ANOM-02 | 19+60 | 2.4 | Low | Verify on ground |
Every anomaly ships flagged for ground verification. A thermal signature is a place to look, not a conclusion that the bank has failed.
What the district knows is how districts describe the problem today. What the flight adds is what comes back from a dawn flight.
What the district knows
What the flight adds
It’s really hard to quantify how much is really leaking out there
areas of constant observation
Why the flight is at dawn
Water working through a bank moves heat with it. The outer face where it emerges gives up that heat more slowly overnight than the dry ground either side. So by first light it reads warmer, a difference a radiometric sensor resolves easily and the eye cannot see at all. Where a flagged point needs a closer look, that look is taken on the bank with the handheld camera. The flight says where.
Fly at noon and the sun has loaded every slope differently by aspect and shadow, and the signal disappears into the weather. The flight is in the dawn window, with water in the canal, on a fixed palette with emissivity and reflected temperature set and logged.
Watch · 0:48
Why the flight is at dawn, what the stationed hotspot map and the ΔT table give a district, and why the second flight is where the baseline pays.
Knowing the canal leaks is not the problem. Knowing which reach is. Districts already fund lining work. The hard part is deciding where to spend it.
Water working through a bank moves heat with it. The outer face where it emerges gives up that heat more slowly overnight than the dry ground either side. So by first light it reads warmer, a difference a thermal camera can pick up when the eye cannot see it at all.
You receive a stationed hotspot map and a ΔT table with severity and verification flags. Thermography locates. It does not quantify.
Every flight becomes your baseline, so the next one shows what changed.
Based in Boise, Idaho. Mobilized across the Intermountain West. Start with one reach. Vertical Recon. Calibrated to defend.
C1 establishes the baseline. C2 adds the dry-channel model. C3 is the re-flight that tells you whether last year's repair held.
A dawn radiometric thermal and visible-light flight over a defined reach. You receive a stationed hotspot map and a ΔT table with severity and verification flags. With them come thermal and visible orthomosaics, a KMZ for the district GIS, and a report covering method, conditions and limitations.
Water in the canal · dawn · spring to fall
A dry-channel orthomosaic and surface model of the same reach, with cross-sections at stations and bank and freeboard geometry. Photogrammetric — see the boundary below.
Canal drained · late fall to winter
The flight repeated on schedule and registered to the prior year. A change map, a trend table and an updated baseline. This is where the baseline starts paying. The second flight is the one that tells you whether last year’s repair held.
Annual · same plan and altitude
Published results from other institutions. Theirs, not ours. Each figure below is a precision figure: how often a flagged site was worth walking to.
Of the 11 sites, 10 had leakage problems. Thus, thermal image analysis had a success rate of 91% for leak detection.
Twenty-six sites were confirmed to have leaks, representing a success rate of 93%.
Where this is used
The decision page: locate canal seepage before you line. Written for irrigation districts and canal companies.
Next step · One reach
A short call sizes the reach, fixes the dawn window, and sets what ground verification your team will do.
We reply within one business day.
