Water-penetrating LiDAR technology was used to remotely sense bathymetric elevation data as part of a spatial data acquisition on the Potomac River. In support of this effort, a bathymetric survey with a boat-mounted acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) was conducted in the study area on October 21-24, 2019. Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) were used to concurrently collect survey grade real-time kinematic (RTK) horizontal and vertical coordinates of the ADCP transducer face. The riverbed elevations were collected using the ADCP with WinRiverII to export for post-processing in Microsoft Excel and ArcMap. The GNSS equipment was programmed to continuously collect an observation every second and the ADCP was programmed to continuously collect an observation ranging from every 1 second to 6 seconds. The corrected depths from the 4 ADCP beams were averaged and then subtracted from the GNSS derived elevation of the ADCP transducer face to compute an elevation of the riverbed.
Potomac River ADCP Bathymetric Survey, October 2019