Our geospatial team has introduced hydrographic surveying into its remit. This type of surveying provides precise data on what lies beneath rivers, channels and water bodies and is changing how engineers, modellers and environmental teams approach their work.
Water is a factor in many projects, yet the data beneath its surface has historically been difficult and costly to obtain. For engineering teams designing bridges and culverts, hydrologists building flood models, and environmental consultants assessing river habitats, that gap in the data can be a source of uncertainty – and, at times, project risk.
Hydrographic surveying is increasingly filling that gap. Using a combination of SONAR, LiDAR, GNSS and probing, specialists can now capture detailed measurements of channel geometry and bed levels across a wide range of environments – channel surveys from open rivers to culverts and transitional wet habitats – and deliver outputs that are ready for immediate use in Flood Risk Assessments, design and modelling workflows.
The practical applications are broad. A bathymetric survey, for example, can establish the precise volume of a water body, underwater morphology and facilitates the production of depth charts – data that feeds directly into hydraulic models and allows flood risk assessments to be made with considerably greater confidence. The same survey outputs inform structural calculations, environmental impact reporting and planning submissions.
Critically, hydrographic data does not sit in isolation. It integrates with topographic surveys and MBS (Measure Building Survey) and utility surveys to produce a more complete and conclusive spatial dataset – one that strengthens decision-making across every discipline working on a project.
For more information please contact Nathanael van den Dolder, Connor Daly or Daniel Pickett, or visit our geospatial webpage.
