scholarly journals Sub-Bankfull Flow Frequency versus Magnitude of Flood Events in Outlining Effective Discharges. Case Study: Trotuș River (Romania)

Water ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Dumitriu

Effective discharge, which represents the flow, or range of flows, that transport the most sediment over the long-term, was determined based on the mean daily flow discharge and mean daily suspended sediment discharge recorded between 1994 and 2014 at four gauging stations along the Trotuș River. This study proposes an efficient method for the estimation of effective discharge based on observed values of the suspended sediment load. By employing this method the suspended sediment load is no longer either under- or overestimated as in the cases when the assessment is based on sediment rating curves. The assessment on effective discharge was performed at two distinct levels: for the entire data series during the investigated time spans and, subsequently, for flows less than the bankfull discharge. The effectiveness curves of the suspended sediment transport characteristics revealed highly multimodal characteristics with many peaks, indicating ample ranges for the effective discharges. The main effective discharge corresponded to large flood events, which are typical for the upper end of the discharge range, whereas the secondary effective discharges corresponded to sub-bankfull flows, which are more frequent. The changes that occurred in the channel bed are reflected by the temporal variations in the effective discharge.

Author(s):  
Dan Dumitriu

Effective discharge, which represents the flow, or range of flows, that transport the most sediment over long term, was determined based on the mean daily flow discharge and mean daily suspended sediment discharge recorded between 1994 and 2014 at four gauging stations along the Trotuș River. This study proposes an efficient method for the estimation of effective discharge based on observed values of the suspended sediment load. By employing this method the suspended sediment load is no longer either under- or overestimated as in the cases when the assessment is based on sediment rating curves. The assessment on effective discharge was performed at two distinct levels: for the entire data series during the investigated time spans and, subsequently, for flows less than the bankfull discharge. The effectiveness curves of the suspended sediment transport characteristics revealed highly multimodal characteristics with many peaks, indicating ample ranges for the effective discharges. The main effective discharge corresponded to large flood events, which are typical for the upper end of the discharge range, whereas the secondary effective discharges corresponded to sub-bankfull flows, which are more frequent. The changes that occurred in the channel bed are reflected by the temporal variations in the effective discharge.


Soil Research ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahadat Hossain ◽  
Bradley Eyre ◽  
David McConchie

Suspended sediment exports from the Richmond River catchment were examined during 2 hydrological years (1994–96). On a yearly basis, the Richmond River catchment produced <2% suspended sediment load during dry seasons, whereas about 75–91% of the yearly suspended sediments were exported during floods which occurred <5% of the year. Annual suspended sediment exports from the Richmond River catchment varied more than 7-fold from dry year to wet year. Among the 3 major subcatchments, Richmond and Wilsons River subcatchments generated >93% of the suspended sediment load, while sediment exports from the Bungawalbin Creek subcatchment always remained low due to its flat topography and extensive forest coverage. Suspended sediment hysteresis patterns exhibited a clockwise response for 2 steep and less forested subcatchments and an anti-clockwise response for relatively low gradient and more forested subcatchment during all flood events. Land use changes in the Richmond River subcatchments indicate a possible increase of suspended sediment load of about 6-fold from their pristine condition.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sardar Ateeq-Ur-Rehman ◽  
Nils Broothaerts ◽  
Ward Swinnen ◽  
Gert Verstraeten

&lt;p&gt;Numerical hydro-morphodynamic models can simulate the impact of future changes in climate and land cover on river channel dynamics. Accurate predictions of the hydro-morphological changes within river channels require a realistic representation of controlling factors and boundary conditions (BC), such as the sediment load. This is, in particular, true where simulations are run over longer timescales and when sparse data on sediment load is available. Using sediment rating curves to reconstruct the missing sediment load data can lead to poor estimates of temporal variations in sediment load, and hence, erroneous predictions of channel morphodynamics. Furthermore, when simulating channel morphological changes at longer timescales, this comes at a high computational cost making it impossible to run various scenarios of changing boundary conditions to long river reaches with sufficient spatial detail. &amp;#160;Here, we apply different methods (morphological factors (MFs) and wavelet transform (WT)) to overcome these problems and to arrive at faster and more accurate predictions of long-term morphodynamic simulations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We modelled river channel bed level changes of the River Dijle (central Belgium) from 1969 to 1999. Detailed cross-sectional surveys every 20 to 25 m along the river axis were collected in 1969, 1999 and 2018. Since 1969, the river has been incised by about 2 m most probably as a response to land-use/land-cover changes and subsequent changes in discharge and sediment load. &amp;#160;Daily discharge and water level measurements are available for the entire period; however, daily suspended sediment load was only collected between 1998 and 2000. Therefore, WTs were coupled with artificial neural networks (WT-ANN) to calculate long-term sediment load BCs (1969-1999) from the short-term collected suspended sediment concentration samples. Sediment load predictions with sediment rating curves only obtain an R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; of 0.115, whereas WT-ANN predictions of suspended sediment load data show an R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; of 0.902.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Using MFs the reference hydrograph was condensed with a factor of 10 and 20. WT is a mathematical tool that can convert time-domain signals into time-frequency domain signals by passing through low and high-level filters. Passing sediment load time series through these filters create another synthetic BCs containing the frequential and spatial information with half the original signal's temporal length. Thus we also compare the modelling performance using WT generated synthetic BCs with MFs. Similarly, 36x1 to 36x10 processors of an HPC was used to simulate 16 km river reach containing 3,33,305 mesh nodes (with 1.5 m mesh resolution). &amp;#160;Interestingly, with a significant reduction in computational cost, there was a mild difference (R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;=0.802 using MFs 10 and R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;=0.763 using MFs 20) in model performance without using MFs during initial trials. Surprisingly, generating a synthetic time series using WT did not perform well. Therefore, hydrograph compression using MFs is found the best option to reduce the computational cost, significantly. Although the computational time reduced from 30 days to only 3 days using MFs and more precise BCs calibrated model with R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;=0.70, WT poor performance needs to be still investigated.&lt;/p&gt;


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 04004
Author(s):  
Clément Misset ◽  
Alain Recking ◽  
Cédric Legout ◽  
Alain Poirel ◽  
Marine Cazilhac

Suspended sediment load represents a large part of total solid fluxes transported in most rivers. Thus, for hydropower plan management or for environmental issues, it is crucial to understand how these sediments are produced, stored and transported in a given catchment. Hysteresis loops in discharge-suspended load signals are commonly used to assess sediment sources and production processes but most of the time the shape of this relation is analyzed qualitatively on short time series or for few events. In this study we analyzed quantitatively 10 long time series of suspended sediment load of various alpine catchments. This method allows us to compare events and to assess to which extent fine sediments originate from hillslope erosion processes or from river bed remobilization. We found that watersheds with braided bed morphology are dominated by clockwise loops while those with narrower bed as step-pool morphology are dominated by counter-clockwise hysteresis or have no general trend. These results suggest that storage and remobilization of fine sediments within the bed could play a major role in suspended sediment transport in Alpine streams, especially in large braided rivers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 8290
Author(s):  
Muhammad Adnan Khan ◽  
Jürgen Stamm ◽  
Sajjad Haider

A key goal of sediment management is the quantification of suspended sediment load (SSL) in rivers. This research focused on a comparison of different means of suspended sediment estimation in rivers. This includes sediment rating curves (SRC) and soft computing techniques, i.e., local linear regression (LLR), artificial neural networks (ANN) and the wavelet-cum-ANN (WANN) method. Then, different techniques were applied to predict daily SSL at the Pirna and Magdeburg Stations of the Elbe River in Germany. By comparing the results of all the best models, it can be concluded that the soft computing techniques (LLR, ANN and WANN) better predicted the SSL than the SRC method. This is due to the fact that the former employed non-linear techniques for the data series reconstruction. The WANN models were the overall best performer. The WANN models in the testing phase showed a mean R2 of 0.92 and a PBIAS of −0.59%. Additionally, they were able to capture the suspended sediment peaks with greater accuracy. They were more successful as they captured the dynamic features of the non-linear and time-variant suspended sediment load, while other methods used simple raw data. Thus, WANN models could be an efficient technique to simulate the SSL time series because they extract key features embedded in the SSL signal.


2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peng Gao

Suspended sediment at the watershed scale has played a critical role in sediment pollution, water-quality degradation, and the impairment of riparian ecosystems, and thus has been widely studied in many disciplines. This paper synthesizes a variety of methods adopted in suspended sediment monitoring, estimation and modelling for understanding sediment transport processes and determining the suspended sediment load. Methods for sediment monitoring are described in terms of direct and indirect approaches. Estimation of suspended sediment load is commonly achieved by establishing a sediment rating curve. Different approaches toward the establishment of a sediment rating curve are examined thoroughly. Techniques of sediment modelling are summarized via depiction of various hydrological and sediment models at the watershed scale. The paper ends with the discussion of future developments in suspended sediment studies at the watershed scale.


Author(s):  
A. Tena ◽  
D. Vericat ◽  
R.J. Batalla

The aim of this study was to build up a sediment budget of the Ribarroja Reservoir, which is located in the lower reach of the River Ebro. For this purpose, we analysed continuous discharge and suspended sediment transport data at several river sections entering the reservoir and at the dam outlet, for the period 2008-2011. The sediment load estimated upstream of the Mequinenza reservoir was 0.66×106 t a-1, whereas the estimated output was 0.04×106 t a-1. The sediment input coming from the large but highly regulated Pyrenean tributaries (Segre and Cinca) was 0.16×106 t a-1, whereas intermittent rivers naturally flowing from the Iberian Range (Matarraña and Algars) supplied an average load of 760 t a-1. The suspended sediment load trapped in the Mequinenza and Ribarroja reservoirs for the study period was estimated at 0.78×106 t a-1, which implies a reduction of ca. 95% of the sediment load of the river. The results illustrate the role of reservoirs in interrupting the sediment transfer in the lower reach of the Ebro, within a context of structural sediment deficit, following widespread land use changes (afforestation) that took place in the catchment after the 1940s.


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