In late June, FDRI’s Community Advisory Group (CAG) and members of the FDRI team spent two days in the Upper Severn catchment, gaining first‑hand insight into FDRI’s monitoring infrastructure, data priorities, and scientific opportunities to strengthen whole water cycle monitoring in the Upper Severn catchment.

FDRI’s CAG is a representative group of future FDRI users from across the hydrological community, providing invaluable guidance on science direction and user needs. You can read more about CAG and its members here.

A total of 29 CAG and FDRI colleagues attended, including colleagues from across FDRI’s partners (NERC, UKCEH, University of Bristol, Imperial and BGS) as well as Natural Resources Wales (NRW), to deepen shared understanding of current capabilities and future requirements for flood and drought resilience research.

Visit highlights

  • Day 1: visit to Dolwen gauging station and Clywedog Dam to review existing infrastructure 
  • Day 2: visit to the long‑running research sites at Plynlimon that are being enhanced through FDRI. This included a tour of existing and new equipment at Carreg Wen, including the new automatic weather station transmitting 1-minute resolution data and a new ground level digital rain gauge. 

Drone showcases

There was also an opportunity to see the latest additions to the FDRI drone fleet including:

  • A 360-camera drone that records video and still imagery, helping us build more comprehensive pictures of catchments and how the water is moving through the landscape
  • A thermal drone to capture detailed variations in water temperature, which provided fascinating insights into the dynamics of Clywedog Reservoir, driven by the hot sun and brisk breezes on the day.
  • Our most compact drone to demonstrate the potential of drone-based discharge measurements in locations that are harder to access and lack gauging infrastructure. This was demonstrated to the CAG at Dolwen gauging station, where a 20-second video enabled the calculation of river flow that was within 3% of the value reported by the gauging station – an excellent result!

The CAG observe the new rain gauge at Carreg Wen.

A 360-degree image of Clywedog Reservoir. 

Thermal imagery (left) of Clywedog Reservoir. The warm land surface can be seen in shade of red to the left of the thermal image, and variations in water temperature are clearly visible in the green and blue colours. 

Water speeds (in metres a second) at Dolwen Gauging Station