A roof is the part of a building nobody looks at until water appears somewhere below it. On a structure the size of Mall of the Emirates — a long curved metal-clad roof over occupied retail, with a solar canopy array across the car park — inspecting it conventionally means access equipment, closures and a lot of people working at height above a live mall.
What we flew
A full day of capture in September 2024, visual and thermal together, flown as automated area routes so the coverage was systematic rather than a pilot working from a list. Six capture sessions ran from late morning through to half past four, which matters more than it sounds: thermal behaviour over a roof changes completely across a day, and a single pass at one hour answers only one question.
The visual set covers the curved cladding panel by panel, the upstands and the roof-to-wall junctions. The thermal set — several thousand radiometric frames — was flown to the same coordinates, so a temperature anomaly can be put straight against a photograph of what is physically there.
The solar canopies
The car park canopy array was captured in the same mobilisation. Photovoltaic inspection wants the opposite conditions to a moisture survey: high irradiance, panels under load, sun high enough that the array is working hard. Flying both on one day means choosing the window for each rather than compromising on one.
Nadir passes over the canopies give a per-panel record — the soiling pattern across a run, a module sitting differently from its neighbours, a junction box warmer than the rest of the string.
What it produced
- Complete visual coverage of the roof, georeferenced and consistently scaled
- Radiometric thermal to the same coordinates, so anomalies are locatable rather than approximate
- Per-panel capture of the solar canopy array
- A dated baseline the next survey registers against
No scaffold, no closures, no one on the roof. The roof and envelope survey and the solar inspection came out of one day on site.
We produce the evidence; the assessment sits with the building surveyor or the engineer who owns the asset. What we are responsible for is that the coverage is complete, the thermal is measurable rather than decorative, and the whole thing can be flown again next year from the same positions.
