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Abstract—This paper proposes a procedure for developing The present paper proposes a new procedure for filtering
reservoir elevation-area-storage capacity curves and data acquired from a depth sounding survey on a reservoir for
bathymetric charts of a reservoir from depth sounding surveys. obtaining the area-storage capacity curves and bathymetric
The Morii Reservoir, located in Bucharest (Romania), on charts.
Dambovita River, was chosen as case study. A single beam
bathymeter with GPS was used in 2016 to survey the reservoir’s A single beam bathymetric survey was conducted in 2016
bed. The acquired bathymetric data were denoised with a on the Morii Reservoir (Lacul Morii in Romanian), from
custom-made program written in Python, that uses the Bucharest City (Romania). Large amounts of raw bathymetric
Butterworth filter and a zero-phase noise cancellation function. data (over 300 000 records) were corrected through a data
The decontaminated data were subsequently interpolated in analysis procedure for removing numerous sources of errors,
ArcGIS to produce a gridded DEM of the reservoir bed surface such as: (1) multiple-return acoustic signals in shallow water
and a bathymetric chart with contour lines. The area-capacity- or false echoes (due to fishes), (2) corrupt DGPS signals, (3)
elevation curves were obtained by calculating the 2D area and redundant depths recorded near the banks, and, most
volume between horizontal planes and the interpolated bed important, (4) erroneous spikes due to the rotation of the boat
surface. Comparisons with bathymetric survey from 2010 show (roll, pitch, and heave). The last source of depth deviations
differences of less than 14% in terms of storage capacity and 8% was decontaminated with the help of a custom-made program
of the area of the reservoir during these 6 years. written in Python. The program uses the Butterworth filter and
a zero-phase noise cancellation function [5], [8].
Index Terms—area-capacity curve, bathymetry, data filtering,
GIS, reservoir silting The objectives of the paper are manifold: (1) to document
the use of advanced instrument technology and software, (2)
I. INTRODUCTION to apply new data-processing techniques, (3) to present an
Bathymetric charts and stage-area-storage capacity curves estimate of the storage capacity of the reservoir in 2016 in
of lakes and reservoirs are essential tools for water comparison with the investigations from 2010 in order to
management and sedimentation monitoring [1], [2]. Getting assess the sedimentation process of Morii Reservoir, and (4) to
high-quality depth sounding data is indispensable for creating develop a bathymetric chart for the management of the
an accurate digital elevation model of the lake or reservoir bed reservoir during floods and draughts.
[3], [4]. GIS processing of the large amount of bathymetric II. STUDY AREA
data requires preliminary correction and filtering of errors [5].
The Morii Reservoir is located in the NW of Bucharest
Reservoir bed mapping is currently a topic of large interest City, upstream of Ciurel Dam, impounding Dambovita River
worldwide and in Romania [6], given its importance for the (Fig. 1). The reservoir has an area of 2.5 mil. m2, with
hydropower sector and sedimentation management. This issue maximum distances across and along the natural river thalweg
is particularly important on Arges River, along which most of line (in black in Fig. 1) of 1.7 km and 2 km, respectively. Its
the reservoirs are more than 50% sediment silted [7]. volume is of about 14.7 mil. m3 for the Normal Operating
Temp HW
Time GPS #Sat HDOP Lat (°) Lon (°) (°C) (m)
18:09.4 DIFF 9 0.9 44.44731 26.03785 26.7 1.21
18:09.5 DIFF 9 0.9 44.44731 26.03785 26.7 1.21
18:09.7 DIFF 9 0.9 44.44731 26.03785 26.7 1.18
18:09.8 DIFF 9 0.9 44.44731 26.03785 26.7 1.19
18:10.0 DIFF 9 0.9 44.44731 26.03785 26.7 1.21
18:10.2 DIFF 9 0.9 44.44731 26.03785 26.7 1.19
Figure 1. Morii Reservoir and depth survey trajectories with internet connection and Google Earth (for instant
trajectory view).
Pool (NOP) stage (at 85 m with respect to Black Sea stage); it
has a mean depth of 7 m and a perimeter of about 7 km. Its The depth soundings obtained are relative to the pool level
main purposes are both flood attenuation and leisure. and the transducer immersion at the time of the survey, so,
Additionally, the reservoir storage is intended to ensure an during the days when bathymetric surveys were conducted,
ecological flow during draught periods along Dambovita both values were registered. The daily mean value of the
canal, which crosses Bucharest city from NW to SE. absolute pool stage with respect to Black Sea datum was read
at the staff gauge installed on the dam. These values were used
III. EQUIPMENT AND DATA to compute the elevation of the reservoir bed from depth
The bathymetric survey was conducted with a Geod Bali soundings.
single beam sonar, from Cadden (France), equipped with a Tab. 1 presents a sample of the measured bathymetric data,
GPS to measure horizontal position through its geographical where #Sat represents the number of visible satellites, HW is
coordinates, x (longitude) and y (latitude), in degrees (Fig. 2). the water height with respect to reservoir elevation, and
The system calculates the depths, h, from the pool level, by Lat/Lon are the geographical coordinates (latitude/longitude)
measuring the time t spent between sending sound pulses at a in degrees.
fixed frequency and receiving their echo reflection from the
reservoir bed. Knowing the sound velocity in water, c, About 34 pre-established transects (20 cross-section
corresponding to a certain water temperature, the depth can be profiles NE-SW, aligned perpendicular to the natural thalweg
calculated with the relation h = c ⋅ t 2 . line and 14 long-profiles NW-SE) were surveyed in the
reservoir (Fig. 1). Since the boat was not equipped with an
The instrument has a differential GPS (with an output rate automated steering system to maintain a straight course, the
of 10 Hz) and a 200 KHz bathymetric transducer (with an obtained trajectories were not rectilinear. However, by
output rate of 6 Hz), both mounted on a segmented rod interpolating the bed surface from the surveyed bathymetric
anchored on a BIC 252 boat, equipped with a 3.5 hp Mercury points within GIS environment, the only concern for the data
engine (Fig. 2). The average Horizontal Dilution of Precision was to uniformly cover the whole reservoir. Data scarcity in
(HDOP) for the geographical coordinates (longitude and some areas is due to the presence of aquatic vegetation close
latitude in WGS84) equaled 1.1 (corresponding to 7–10 to the water surface.
visible satellites, for clear, visible sky). The vertical precision
is of 0.2% of depth, corrected with water temperature (which, IV. METHOD FOR BATHYMETRIC DATA FILTERING
during the survey, was in the range 24–28°C) and salinity to It is well-known that bathymetric data can be very large
get an accurate sound velocity in water. No corrections with and difficult to manage, especially without the use of
pressure were made, since the range of depth values had no expensive software for processing navigation data. The data
influence on celerity. The system can be linked to a laptop measured with the bathymeter is affected by inherent errors
and noise having multiple causes such as: static draft, vessel
speed, changes in draft with loading and speed changes, vessel
roll, pitch and heave (Fig. 3), sensor positioning (including
horizontal datum), misalignment angles between the sonar and
the motion sensor, sound speed structure, water state, etc. [9].
Other important sources of errors are: biological layers
(vegetation, fish) in the water column or objects on the
reservoir bed and bed penetration due to sonar frequency or
acoustic impedance of the bed [9].
Prior to using the raw measured data (depths and
positions) for generating the surface of the reservoir bed, the
errors and the noise must be filtered. For this purpose, the
Figure 2. Geod Bali bathymeter with GPS on the engine boat digital version of the Butterworth filter [10] was used in this
the filter roll-off is and at what frequency the stop-band
paper as a low pass filter. This filter was chosen because it has
a more linear phase-response in the pass-band than other
filters, such as the Chebyshev Type I and Type II filters or the
elliptic filter. The main drawback of the Butterworth filter is
its slower roll-off, which requires a higher order to implement
a particular stop-band specification. The key parameters of
this filter are its order and the cut-off frequency. To properly
filter the bathymetric data, these two parameters should be
carefully chosen. All data processing was carried out using
Python scripts and functions from Matplotlib [11] and
SciPy [12] libraries.
The choice of the filter parameters is further explained by
using the data measured along two boat tracks (trajectories),
shown in Fig. 4. Track 1 goes from SW to NE, while Track 2
goes from SE to NW. It should be mentioned here that all the
measured bathymetric data were processed with the same filter
parameters, not only the data pertaining to Tracks 1 and 2.