Effects of antecedent hydrologic conditions, time dependence, and climate cycles on the suspended sediment load of the Salinas River, California

Gray, Andrew B.; Pasternack, G. B.; Watson, E. B.; Warrick, Jonathan A.; Goñi, Miguel A.

doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2015.04.025

Cited by 49 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…14). These results are consistent with longer records from larger rivers in the southern California (Warrick and Milliman, 2003) and other small watersheds in semi-arid regions throughout the world (e.g., Coppus and Imeson, 2002;Rustomji and Wilkinson, 2008;Duvert et al, 2011Duvert et al, , 2012Conaway et al, 2013;Gray et al, 2015), which show that infrequent events produce the majority of water and sediment discharge from these watersheds.…”

Section: Comparison Of Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Sediment yields from small, steep coastal watersheds of California

Warrick

Mélack

Goodridge

2015

Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies

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a b s t r a c tStudy region: Coastal watersheds of southern California, United States. Study focus: We sought to better understand the rates and variability of suspendedsediment discharge from small coastal watersheds (<100 km 2 ) of California. Suspendedsediment concentrations and stream discharge were measured with automated samplers near the mouths of four small watersheds (10-56 km 2 ). New hydrological insights for the region: The watersheds were found to have suspendedsediment concentrations that extended over five orders of magnitude (1 to over 100,000 mg L −1 ). Sediment concentrations were weakly correlated with discharge (r 2 = 0.10-0.25), and four types of hysteresis patterns were observed during high flow events (clockwise, counterclockwise, no hysteresis, and complex). Annual sediment yields varied by 400-fold across the four watersheds (e.g., 5-2100 t km −2 yr −1 during the 2003-2006 water years), and sediment discharge was measurably elevated in one watershed that was partially burned by a late summer wildfire. Dozens of high flow events provided evidence that suspended-sediment yields were generally related to peak stream discharge and event-based precipitation, although these relationships were not consistent across the watersheds. This suggests that watersheds smaller than 100 km 2 can provide large -and therefore important -fluxes of sediment to the coast, but that simple techniques to estimate sediment loads, such as sediment rating curves, hydrologic regressions, and extrapolation using global sediment yield relationships that include watershed area as a primary factor, may provide poor results.Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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Section: Comparison Of Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Sediment yields from small, steep coastal watersheds of California

Warrick

Mélack

Goodridge

2015

Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies

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“…Contributing areas behind dams were masked for the time periods of their operation, as the trapping efficiency of these dams was previously estimated as > 90% for fine sediment (Gray et al, 2015b). The areal extent of fires in undammed portions of the watershed was then summed by year for further computations of effective burn area (Fig.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notably, no change in the relationship between precipitation and discharge was found over this time period (Gray et al, 2015a). By taking these factors and the temporal dependence of sediment behavior into consideration, the average annual suspended sediment flux was estimated as 2.1 to 2.4 Mt (Gray et al, 2015b).…”

mentioning

confidence: 92%

“…inter-decadal time scales, particularly in arid to semi-arid climates (Morehead et al, 2003;Walling and Fang, 2003;Syvitski et al, 2005;Gao et al, 2013, Gray et al, 2015b. However, attributing changes in sediment regimes to a discrete cause is often complicated by the overprinting of many external drivers and internal dynamics that affect watershed scale sediment production and transport, which tend to obscure the effects of individual forcing factors (Walling, 1977;Syvitski et al, 2000).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Conversion to drip irrigated agriculture may offset historic anthropogenic and wildfire contributions to sediment production

Gray

Pasternack

Watson

et al. 2016

Science of The Total Environment

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This study is an investigation into the roles of wildfire and changing agricultural practices in controlling the inter-decadal scale trends of suspended sediment production from semi-arid mountainous rivers. In the test case, a decreasing trend in suspended sediment concentrations was found in the lower Salinas River, California between 1967 and 2011. Event to decadal scale patterns in sediment production in the Salinas River have been found to be largely controlled by antecedent hydrologic conditions. Decreasing suspended sediment concentrations over the last 15 years of the record departed from those expected from climatic/hydrologic forcing. Sediment production from the mountainous headwaters of the central California Coast Ranges is known to be dominated by the interaction of wildfire and large rainfall/runoff events, including the Arroyo Seco, a ~700 km 2 subbasin of the Salinas River. However, the decreasing trend in Salinas River suspended sediment concentrations run contrary to increases in the watershed's effective burn area over time. The sediment source area of the Salinas River is an order of magnitude larger than that of the Arroyo Seco, and includes a more complicated mosaic of land cover and land use. The departure from hydrologic forcings on suspended sediment concentration patterns was found to coincide with a rapid conversion of irrigation practices from sprinkler and furrow to subsurface drip irrigation. Changes in agricultural operations appear to have decreased sediment supply to the Salinas River over the late 20 th to early 21 st centuries, obscuring the influence of wildfire on suspended sediment production.

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“…To achieve the "predicted DSLs", we fitted "log transformed (ln) Q d s" in the rating curve equations to get "predicted ln DSLs" at first and then transformed back thus obtained "predicted ln DSLs" by taking their exponential values. We also checked potential log-biasing in this retransformation procedure using the following correction factor (CF) given by Duan [47] and modified by Gray et al [48] because, firstly, it does not require normality of residuals and, secondly, residuals for a few rating curves in our analyses were not normally distributed (p-values < 0.05 in Shapiro-Wilk tests).…”

Section: Development Of Discharge-sand Load Rating Curvesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of Suspended Sand Availability under Different Flow Conditions of the Lowermost Mississippi River at Tarbert Landing during 1973–2013

Joshi

2015

Water

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Rapid land loss in the Mississippi River Delta Plain has led to intensive efforts by state and federal agencies for finding solutions in coastal land restoration in the past decade. One of the proposed solutions includes diversion of the Mississippi River water into drowning wetland areas. Although a few recent studies have investigated flow-sediment relationships in the Lowermost Mississippi River (LmMR, defined as the 500 km reach from the Old River Control Structure to the river's Gulf outlet), it is unclear how individual sediment fractions behave under varying flow conditions of the river. The information can be especially pertinent because the quantity of coarse sands plays a critical role for the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River deltaic development. In this study, we utilized long-term (1973-2013) records on discharge and sediments at Tarbert Landing of the LmMR to assess sand behavior and availability under different river flow regimes, and extreme sand transport events and their recurrence. We found an average annual sand load (SL) of 27.2 megatonnes (MT) during 1973 and 2013, varying largely from 3.37 to 52.30 MT. For the entire 41-year study period, a total of approximately 1115 MT sand were discharged at Tarbert Landing, half of which occurred during the peak 20% flow events. A combination of intermediate, high and peak flow stages (i.e., river discharge was ě18,000 cubic meter per second) produced about 71% of the total annual SL within approximately 120 days of a year. Based on the long-term sediment assessment, we predict that the LmMR has a high likelihood to transport 4 to 446 thousand tonnes of sand every day over the next 40 years, during which annual sand loads could reach a maximum of 51.68 MT. Currently, no effective plan is in place to utilize this considerably high sand quantity and we suggest that river engineering and sediment management in the LmMR consider practices of hydrograph-based approach for maximally capturing riverine sediments.

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Effects of antecedent hydrologic conditions, time dependence, and climate cycles on the suspended sediment load of the Salinas River, California

Cited by 49 publications

References 49 publications

Sediment yields from small, steep coastal watersheds of California

Sediment yields from small, steep coastal watersheds of California

Conversion to drip irrigated agriculture may offset historic anthropogenic and wildfire contributions to sediment production

Assessment of Suspended Sand Availability under Different Flow Conditions of the Lowermost Mississippi River at Tarbert Landing during 1973–2013

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