Water Level Sensor for rivers & flooding

Other Hardware Sensors
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First, I am brand new to Arduino and I will be reading through all of the Water Level Sensor Threads that I can find. I have also joined 2 Arduino clubs so I should hopefully learn quickly over the next few months. However, while doing this I also wanted to be proactive and post a question on here.

I am looking to create a sensor that measures river level heights for large rivers that have extreme seasonal flooding (e.g. the Zambezi River).

A river like the Zambezi would pose a few difficulties because:

  1. Many areas are remote so data would need to be sent out using cell towers or collected by someone (possibly using bluetooth 4.0)

  2. During the flood season the sensor would need to be protected from debris and silt.

  3. The power source for the sensor would need to be changed as infrequently as possible.

  4. The cost and size of the sensor would need to be relatively small.

Also, I am sure that when I test the sensor I will come up with many other problems.

I would really appreciate any advice into what sensors I should start looking into and experimenting with.

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commonly user are pressure-sensors mountet inside i pipe (blocked at top)
Outside sensor for reference.
Pipe needs to be fixed to stable ground.
An ATmega-chip can have several variants of 'sleep' for powersaving.

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Zambezi River - that's in a sunny place. Equip sensor with solar panel to keep a battery charged.
Rivers can flow prettty violently, in addition to debris as you mentioned. Consider mounting sensors on tree branches over hanging the river, use ultrasonic or similar to determine distance from water top to the sensor.
Also less likely to be vandalized/stolen.

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Great! Thanks for the info. I am going to have to ask a couple people that I'm in contact with about which method would work best. Ultrasonic or pressure. Anyways, thanks for helping to get me started in the right direction.

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I've been using the weatherproof Maxbotix ultrasonic sensor to monitor the water level in my canal on Lake st. clair for a couple of years now. You can see the results at: 50.4.202.229

I'm using a Parallax stamp with a Netburner webserver. I'm currently rewriting the program to run on an Arduino. I calculate the distance from the top of the seawall to the water and then calculate the water depth from that. (I know the exact elevation of the seawall top.) If you have any questions about doing this, I'm happy to help. Just send me a message.

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