Development and Validation of a Drone-Deployable Water Depth Sensor for Landslide Dam Monitoring

This study addresses the urgent need to monitor the water depth of landslide dams, which themselves have the potential to cause downstream flooding. A drone-deployable water depth sensor was developed to enable this monitoring. The sensor employs a simple mechanism that calculates water depth based on the number of reel rotations, enabling long-term, fixed-point observations despite its compact size and lightweight design. The experiments demonstrated the sensor's accuracy, operational duration, and the feasibility of its deployment scenarios.