DRONES

Photo: Karuna Sah
Increased efficiency of hydropower generation through improved snow water monitoring
Details
- Period: 2021-09-01 – 2024-12-31
- Budget: 3,998,504 SEK
- Funder: Swedish Energy Agency
- Type of funding: Project support
Description
The main objective of DRONES is to increase the efficiency of hydropower generation, and such increase the potential as an efficient, regulating, renewable energy resource and limit its environmental impact by better predicting the size of the spring flood. In the previous SNODDAS project, a methodology was developed where we use satellite data, hydrological modeling, machine learning, and data assimilation to get a measure of the snow water amounts upstream of a power plant dam.
DRONES investigate whether we can replace the expensive manual and ground-based snow observations with drone-borne observations, and test this in combination with the concept we developed in SNODDAS on a handful of climatologically and topographically different catchment areas along the mountain chain. The aim is to reduce the uncertainty in estimating the amount of snow water in a catchment area to less than 10% at a minimum of costs. We expect to better utilize potential hydropower in years when snow water amounts are different from normal with better knowledge of snow water amounts. The catchment areas we focus our observations on are Överuman (Umeälven), Korsvattnet (Indalälven) and Trängslet (Österdalälven). We have collected a large amount of data during the 2023 and 2024 field campaigns. We expect a series of publications and reports from this in the coming years.
Cooperation partners
SMHI, Vattenregleringsföretagen