Measuring river velocities using GPS River Flow Tracers (GRiFTers)

Existing methods of measuring flow velocities in natural rivers are largely based on series of point measurements. Acquisition of these data can be time consuming and difficult, especially in high flow conditions. This paper introduces the use of GPS drifters (termed GRiFTers) to measure surface flow velocities in a 400 m reach of the River Swale, UK. Over 10 000 measurements were made in a 3 hour period and aggregated over a 2 m grid to generate a genuine distributed representation of flow across the reach. The technique shows great promise to provide new insights into flow patterns over long reaches of rivers, over a range of flow conditions, and may also provide valuable data for numerical model validation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.