Analysis of Coast Topography by RTK GPS and Echo Sounder

Measuring the depth of water is very important in ensuring the protection and safety of seaside. There are many difficulties in making the contour bathymetric map, and contour line due to the limitation of continuous measurement of water depth and collimation with the conventional measuring and positioning methods. But the real-time kinematic GPS (RTK GPS) positioning using a carrier phase enables us to decide a precise position without breaking a signal even under the condition of a moving environment. It is also possible to obtain an accurate depth of water in real time with a fathometer through the measuring of time delay between sending and receiving epochs. This research aims at investigation of accuracy potential of RTK GPS in combination with Echo Sounder(E/S) for the coastal mapping. Apart from this purpose, the accuracy of ambiguity resolution with the OTF(On the Fly) method was tested with respect to the initialization time. The result shows that the accuracy is better than 1cm with 5-minute initialization in the distance of 10km baseline. The seaside topography was measured by the RTK GPS only, on the other hand the seafloor topography was surveyed in combination of RTK GPS and E/S. Comparing to the volume of seaside measured by RTK GPS and digital topographical map, the difference of only 2 % was achieved. This indicates that the coastal mapping with RTK GPS is successfully conducted. In addition it is also demonstrated that the 3-dimensional perspective model resulted from the undersea topography measured by RTK GPS and E/S is very close to that from the digital map. Through this study, it was verified that RTK GPS is to be very useful method in the analysis of coastal morphology owing to its capability of getting the precise DTM for the using of harbor reclamation, dredging, and the estimation of soil movement in a river.