A University of Iowa researcher is working toward commercializing a new method to estimate river flow, which will provide more accurate real-time data and improve water engineering and public safety.

Marian Muste, a research engineer in the UI College of Engineering and the inventor of the method HyGage,  said his team received a patent for the project in January.

The project, Muste said, has been supported by more than $1.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, and the Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology, a national research partnership led by the University of Alabama that turns advanced water science into real-world tools.

Muste said his team took an eight-week course through the National Science Foundation called Innovation Corps to better understand how to move scientific advancements toward commercialization.

Muste said most standard river gauging stations around the world, operated by agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey, estimate the flow of a river by measuring the water’s height and using a pre-built chart called a rating curve.

The rating curve is created by matching water height to direct flow measurements over time, but it doesn’t work well during storms and floods, when water levels are rising or falling quickly, Muste said. 

Greg Brennan, a hydrogeologist for the Iowa Geological Survey, wrote in  an email to The Daily Iowan that weaknesses in the rating curve system can arise during storms because the river’s height is constantly changing, throwing off the calibration of the rating curve, giving an erroneous estimate of river flow.

Brennan said agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey, a federal agency that monitors and analyzes natural resource conditions, will attempt to disregard the significantly higher elevation of the river during a storm, similar to disregarding the height of one’s shoes to get a true height, to fix the erroneous rating curve. 

Brennan said the same problem can arise when trying to estimate river flow from the physical shape and dimensions of a river channel, which are also often subject to change.

Muste said agencies can correct inaccuracies in a rating curve, but the process is costly and not done in real time. Agencies often instead release provisional data and review or calibrate the curves months later, after the flood has passed.

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“They offer the real-time data for six months, and every six months they look back, and if it’s not the case, they correct it, but that’s too late for a flood which comes tomorrow,” he said. 

Muste said HyGage differs from traditional river gauges by directly measuring multiple variables such as water height, velocity, and surface slope, and using physics to calculate discharge instead of relying on the rating curve. 

Muste said conventional methods assume the river behaves the same on rising and falling flows, while HyGage accounts for changes in the flow during the transitions, making it more accurate during storms and floods 

While Muste said the new system would bring about more reliable real-time monitoring and flood forecasting, he noted it would be difficult to quantify how much more effective HyGage is over rating curves for a specific station.

“It’s difficult to put one number to say they are wrong by 15, 20 percent, or this much because it depends on every site, it’s different, and every storm is different,” he said. 

Muste said the HyGage system could be added to existing stream monitoring sites in the U.S., and instead of replacing old river monitoring equipment, agencies could add instruments that measure surface slope and velocity alongside water height.

Muste said the research team does not have a time estimate for when the new method could be put into production, and further analysis comparing the effectiveness of HyGage and traditional methods will be needed before investors would be confident in providing funding for the new method.

Anthony Lamoreux, a graduate research assistant on the HyGage research team, said Muste’s invention receiving a patent is a testament to his forward thinking.

“Marian is always thinking of the next step or the next couple of steps. He’s been very early on technologies and methodologies like HyGage. He spends most of his time telling us normal people how it all works and how it will work in the future,” he said.

Lamoreux said the research team is actively collecting data and experimenting with telemetry, or collecting data with sensors instead of with someone present at the site.

Lamoreux said the Innovation Corps Program helped the team to be more open toward investors who they otherwise would not have considered.

“There are many paths you can take, but you need to understand as developers that your initial thought may not and probably is not the final path you’re going to take,” he said. “I’m pretty excited to see what the future holds for HyGage.”