Exploring the Signature of Climate, Catchment, and Internal Variability on River Suspended Sediment Dynamics

Abstract

Suspended sediment and fine particles represent a substantial fraction of the mass leaving a watershed, water quality concerns, potential to both degrade and enhance local ecosystem services, and a significant carrier of environmental nutrients and contaminants.

Hypotheses: Minimal interaction leads to a more direct signal of external factors, and significant interaction with the river bed leads to shredding of these signals.

Conclusions: Remove the signal of river self-organization to disentangle autogenic processes from external phenomena, and strong scaling with local hydraulic variables indicates a larger role for channel morphology and instream storage for fine particle transport. Further, these relations provide a strong basis for estimating suspended sediment transport in ungauged or minimally monitored catchments.

Citation

Phillips, C.B., Horton, D.E. and Packman, A.I., 2018, December. Exploring the signature of climate and internal variability on river suspended sediment dynamics. In AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts (Vol. 2018, pp. EP53F-1970).