Using a Thermal Drone to Identify Flat Roof Moisture Issues Following Severe Weather in Dallas, TX

Over the last few weeks, the Dallas/Fort Worth area has seen quite a bit of inclement weather. High winds and heavy rain took a toll on a lot of local infrastructure. So, when we were contacted by a long-time roofing company client to perform a thermal drone inspection, we weren’t surprised; we expected to find quite a bit of potential moisture issues in the wake of this severe weather, and we certainly did. Keep reading to learn more about our process and what we found on this project (this project serves as a particularly great example of the benefit of aerial thermography in moisture identification).

Pre-Inspection Planning

As always, pre-inspection planning is critical when it comes to gathering accurate data from a thermal roof inspection. Since we have extensively covered the specific environmental criteria we look for leading up to an inspection in several other places on our site, we won’t go into detail here, but we’ll briefly discuss the major considerations.

Given the amount of rain the metroplex received during this recent bout of inclement weather, it was critical that we allowed adequate time for any standing water on the roof to evaporate prior to performing the inspection. Thankfully, a day or two went by without rain, the latter of which was bright, warm, and sunny.

We felt confident that these conditions would ensure that any standing/pooling water on the roof would evaporate by the time we did the thermal roof scan.

Doing the Inspection

This particular inspection was fairly straightforward. The property consisted of approximately 70,000 square feet of roof spread out between a few different roof sections of a large complex.

We conducted our inspection just like normal, ensuring that there is a practical methodology behind the sequence at which we capture the thermograms to facilitate seamless orientation when viewing the end product.

The Results

As we suspected, the roof(s) showed several major indications of possible moisture ingress issues. Take a look at the images below.

Thermal image of suspected moisture damage on flat roof.

As you can see, there are several significant “hot spots” (depicted in orange/yellow in this color palette) that are indicative of potential moisture issues. This is just a small selection of these suspect areas we observed during the scan.

As always, we tune the thermal images we capture in post-processing software. Then, we compile them all into a report/analysis document and provide preliminary analysis of what we observed.