Lasers will be used as part of a 12-month study of the Mary River aimed at generating a clearer understanding of how rising sea levels will affect the catchment.
Civil engineers from Charles Darwin University are leading the $200,000 project on behalf of the Territory Government to assess the effectiveness of several man-made barrages.
CDU's Professor of Civil Engineering, Eric Valentine says the study will use the latest technology to track the movement of water around the barrages and across the floodplain.
"We'll be surveying the floodplain in various ways and we're hoping to use a lidar technique," he said.
"This is an aerial-borne laser measurement technique to discover the topography of the land and that information will be used in our numerical models to monitor the flows in the system."