Bathymetric Survey at the Mercatale Dam

We interviewed Samuele Fantini,, a technician from Novatest responsible for providing bathymetry and data analysis services for the Mercatale Dam in Sassocorvaro, in the province of Pesaro-Urbino, using a boat for monitoring the depths of freshwater bodies.

Samuele, how was the operational model structured?

The service was structured in two phases: the first phase involved the acquisition of georeferenced depth points, and the second phase involved the analysis of the acquired data to determine the bathymetric curves and reservoir volume.

Can you describe the operations of the two phases in more detail?

During the first phase, also known as the sounding phase, a boat was used in manual and automatic guiding modes with pre-programmed routes. The manual and automatic guiding allowed us to optimize the approximation of the reservoir perimeter. In the second phase, the acquired data was loaded into a geographic information system. The post-processing involved several activities, including harmonizing the coordinate and depth values obtained during the initial sounding phase, transforming the coordinates from the WGS 84 reference system to IGM95/UTM, interpolating the bathymetric coordinates, generating contour lines, and calculating the reservoir volume.

Samuele, can you further explain the purpose of data harmonization?

It means being able to clean the file from any errors in the coordinates that can be generated by the sonar when it is out of the water or at depths less than 15 cm.

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