Capturing the Europe July 2021 flood event flows with an IP camera and OpenRiverCam

OpenRiverCam is a fully open-source, user-friendly, low cost and sustainable web-software stack with API to establish and maintain river rating curves (relationships between geometry and river discharge) in small to medium sized streams based on Large Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LSPIV). The software is co-designed with practitioners from The Netherlands (Waterboard Limburg and KNMI) and Tanzania (Wami - Ruvu Basin Authority and TMA) with the principle that organizations should be able to establish and maintain operational flow monitoring sites and networks at low costs. A user only requires to establish a temporary or permanent camera site; a simple field survey to measure river cross sections and several control points; and feeding operational videos into the dashboard of the software.

In July 2021, a severe flood event hit several Western European countries including parts of Germany, France, The Netherlands and Belgium. Also the Geul river, a tributary to the Meuse river was severely affected. One of our camera setups was operational at the Geul, near the village Hommerich during the event. The camera recorded 10 second videos every 15 minutes. Through the recordings of this single event, we were able to reconstruct flows and prepare a large number of rating points over a wide diversity of flow domains within a period of less than 12 hours. In this presentation we will share the results of our analysis, and validation against formal flow observations of the Waterboard Limburg. We plan to extend the software with improved pre-processing and allow use of less precise smart phone videos.