When Hurricane Helene sent floodwaters into neighborhoods across St. Petersburg in September 2024, eight experimental cameras quietly kept taking pictures.
Mounted above flood-prone streets and waterways, the solar-powered cameras photographed rising water every 15 minutes, creating a visual record of one of the region’s most destructive storms. Less than two weeks later, they did it again during Hurricane Milton.
Today, there are about 40 cameras across Pinellas County. St. Petersburg City Council approved another July 23, expanding a University of South Florida research network designed to help scientists better understand how flooding develops and how communities can prepare for it.
The unanimous July 23 vote authorized a three-year license agreement allowing USF to install a flood-monitoring camera at Clam Bayou Preserve, near Perry Bayview Community Playground. The university will pay the city a nominal $10 fee for use of the site and will maintain the equipment.
Councilmember Brandi Gabbard pulled the item from the consent agenda to highlight the growing partnership between the city and USF.
“There are a couple of areas in the city where we have a bit of a gap in the flood cameras,” Gabbard said, explaining that the Clam Bayou site will help close one of those gaps.
The new installation builds on a project that began before Helene and Milton were ever forecast.
Barnali Dixon, a professor in USF’s School of Geosciences, received National Science Foundation funding in 2023 to develop a different approach to flood monitoring. Instead of relying only on rain gauges or water-level sensors, her team created solar-powered camera stations that photograph flood-prone locations every 15 minutes.
“The National Science Foundation does not fund projects unless it’s truly unique and innovative,” Dixon said.
Researchers installed the first eight cameras shortly before Hurricane Helene arrived. Rather than waiting years to evaluate the technology, they found themselves documenting two historic storms within weeks.
“We had eight cameras,” Dixon said. “Now we have 40 cameras.”
Each monitoring station includes a nearby pole marked with reflective stripes. As floodwaters rise, researchers can estimate water depth by examining how many stripes remain visible in each photograph.
The images provide something conventional gauges cannot.
“You can see more damage,” Dixon said. “You cannot see as much damage as simple rain gauge data.”
Beyond measuring water depth, the photographs reveal where flooding spreads, how quickly it develops and what it leaves behind after the water recedes.
Researchers are using those observations to create flood inundation maps and improve computer models capable of estimating flood depth. During one August 2025 rain event, a camera documented water rising more than 5 feet in about an hour. During Hurricane Helene, another tracked floodwaters climbing from roughly 2 feet to more than 3 feet before receding.
The camera network is one part of USF’s Community Resiliency Information System, known as CRIS-Hazard. The project also includes a public flood-reporting app that Dixon compares to “Waze for flooding.”
Residents can upload photos of flooded streets and estimate water depth, creating a crowdsourced record that researchers compare with rainfall, tide information and images from nearby cameras. The goal is to improve flood models while giving residents another tool to understand conditions during storms.
Dixon said the information could also help emergency responders better understand conditions on flooded roads and determine what equipment is needed to safely reach affected areas.
As the research expands, so does the partnership with local governments. St. Petersburg has now approved nine locations for the monitoring network, and Gabbard said city leaders continue identifying places where additional coverage is needed.
For Dixon, however, the cameras represent something larger than a growing network of sensors.
Research projects like this, she said, begin with questions that have never been answered before. Every storm, every new camera and every image collected helps move that work forward.
“We’re working with my students and innovating things that did not exist before,” Dixon said. “We work through the challenges that come our way every day and brainstorm how to solve them.”
This content provided in partnership with StPeteCatalyst.com
