Development of a Multiscale Monitoring and Health Assessment Framework for Effective Management of Levee Infrastructure

This paper presents an overview of a framework to assess the structural integrity and health of earthen levees. The framework is being developed through a project supported by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and relies on remote sensing and field monitoring data of levees during environmental loading conditions and natural processes of degradation. The monitoring data consists of levee displacements obtained using satellite-based interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), Global Position System (GPS) receivers, and Shape-Acceleration Pore Pressure (SAPP) Arrays. These measurements are used in an integrated fashion to localize internal zones of degradation within levees and quantify the corresponding level of weakening. The framework is demonstrated using test data of small scale centrifuge levee models.