Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

Reclamation alone holds 8,116 miles of in-service water conveyance canals within its infrastructure inventory. Many of these canal systems have aged beyond their original intended lifespan and are showing signs of aging and disrepair, extensive seepage and embankment failure events are becoming increasingly common, and consequences of canal failures within urban corridors are constantly increasing due to urban encroachment on these water conveyance structures. In addition to the problem of increased risk related to canal embankment failures, concentrated and distributed seepage poses a major challenge to water conservation due to significant water conveyance system losses. As a result, there is an ongoing need to identify and comprehensively characterize canal seepage, both for safety-related and water conservation efforts and is the main motivation for this proposed research. The seepage detection and characterization in canal sites by means of the Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite remote sensing technology is an important research topic to evaluate suitable resolution and realistic limitations of the SAR to detect canal seepage and be used as a comprehensive monitoring technique for identification of potential seep locations at canal infrastructure. The InSAR data processing results at known seep locations indicate that corresponding dates of canal watering-up/de-watering correlate with the changes of SAR mean line-of-sight (LOS) velocity (mm/year) values obtain from timeseries analysis at known seep locations.