Development of a sediment delivery model for application in large river basins

✍ Scribed by Pamela S. Naden; David M. Cooper

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 357 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6087
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1085(199905)13:7<1011::aid-hyp787>3.0.co;2-0

✦ Synopsis

This paper presents an analysis of available data on suspended sediment concentrations in rivers within the Yorkshire region. It identi®es the main control on the mean suspended sediment concentration across 62 medium-sized catchments (5±380 km 2 ) to be that of land cover/use, with the percentage of cropped and suburban/urban land accounting for 71 . 5% of the variation between catchments. Twenty-two of the sites have associated ¯ow gauging, and analysis of this reveals a strong ¯ow dependence for catchments with a high percentage of arable land. In the case of urbanized catchments, there is considerable scatter owing to the in¯uence of point source inputs: notably sewage euent, combined sewer over¯ows, drainage from colliery waste and mine waters. This scatter is due not only to the inherent variability within these point sources, which is not ¯ow related, but also to the variable degree of dilution by ¯ow in the main stream. As a ®rst-order approximation, a simple regression model, in which sediment concentration is a function of the daily mean ¯ow and the percentage of cropped and suburban/urban land cover can be used to generate daily time-series of sediment concentration. This model has been applied within the LOIS catchment delivery model and performs well across a wide range of catchment types. Results are presented for four catchments representative of the Yorkshire region.