Unlike flooding along river channels, groundwater flooding tends to occur in isolated basins across the landscape. As such, it would require an impractical amount of field monitoring to provide a comprehensive picture across entire catchments. Remote sensing approaches now offer the potential to describe flood conditions quickly, accurately, and at a large spatial scale, even over remote and rugged terrain. The increased availability of remote sensing data in recent decades, such as the USGS Landsat or ESA Sentinel programmes, has made it a valuable resource in the field of flood management. We will be developing new methods to use this satellite data to map groundwater floods across the limestone lowlands of Ireland.
In addition, the Geological Survey is developing high-resolution topography maps to accurately estimate dynamic water volumes within turloughs. These maps are being generated using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) surveys which also allows us to map karst features for groundwater resource and groundwater protection maps.
