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- Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon
- GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
The River Plume Workflow is a part of the Digital Earth Flood event explorer (FEE), which was designed to compile different aspects of riverine flood events.
The focus of the River Plume Workflow is the impact of riverine flood events on the marine environment, when, at the end of a flood event chain, an unusual amount of nutrients and pollutants is washed into the coastal waters. The River Plume Workflow provides scientists with tools to detect river plumes in marine data during or after an extreme event and to investigate their spatio-temporal extent, their propagation and impact. This is achieved through the combination of in-situ data from autonomous measuring devices, drift model data produced especially for the observational data and satellite data of the observed area. In the North Sea, we use measurements from the FerryBox mounted on the Büsum-Helgoland ferry to obtain regular in-situ data and offer model trajectories from drift simulations around the time of extreme events in the Elbe River.
The River Plume Workflow helps scientists identify river plume candidates either manually within a visual interface or through an automatic anomaly detection algorithm, using Gaussian regression. Combining the observational data with model trajectories that show the position of a measured water body up to 10 days before and after the measurement allows to investigate the propagation of an anomaly, as well as to check its origin, e.g. the Elbe estuary. This way, scientists can identify regions of interest presumably impacted by riverine flood events. Combining model trajectories with satellite data also provides scientists with time series of parameters, e.g. Chlorophyll-A, along a model trajectory, allowing research on degradation rates and unusual behavior during or after an extreme event.
With the deployment of the River Plume Workflow coming up, I would like to demonstrate the functionalities of the tool and discuss its applications.