• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.43 no.3
• /
• pp.321-335
• /
• 2023

Monitoring sediment loads in natural rivers is the key process in river engineering, but it is costly and dangerous. In practice, suspended loads are directly measured, and total loads, which is a summation of suspended loads and bed loads, are estimated. This study proposes a real-time sediment discharge monitoring system using the horizontal acoustic Doppler current profiler (H-ADCP) and support vector regression (SVR). The proposed system is comprised of the SVR model for suspended sediment concentration (SVR-SSC) and for total loads (SVR-Q_TL), respectively. SVR-SSC estimates SSC and SVR-Q_TL mimics the modified Einstein procedure. The grid search with K-fold cross validation (Grid-CV) and the recursive feature elimination (RFE) were employed to determine SVR's hyperparameters and input variables. The two SVR models showed reasonable cross-validation scores (R²) with 0.885 (SVR-SSC) and 0.860 (SVR-Q_TL). During the time-series sediment load monitoring period, we successfully detected various sediment transport phenomena in natural streams, such as hysteresis loops and sensitive sediment fluctuations. The newly proposed sediment monitoring system depends only on the gauged features by H-ADCP without additional assumptions in hydraulic variables (e.g., friction slope and suspended sediment size distribution). This method can be applied to any ADCP-installed discharge monitoring station economically and is expected to enhance temporal resolution in sediment monitoring.

• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
• /
• v.30 no.12
• /
• pp.1209-1217
• /
• 2008

For efficient turbid water management a SWAT model was established for the Imha-Andong watershed where serious turbid water problems have frequently occurred. To evaluate soil loss combined with rainfall runoff process, the analysis focused on comparing the daily runoff discharge and concentration of suspended sediment (SS) using measured data sets. The results of annual SS load analysis for each sub-basin using the calibrated model showed that in the entire target watershed the soil loss ranged from 0.7 to 5.9 tons/ha in year 2005 and from 3.0 to 34.0 tons/ha in year 2003 when the typhoon 'Maemi' severly affected the area. In the future, it is suggest to increase model simulation accuracies supported by a long-term and extensive monitoring to enhance basin-wide suspended sediment estimation and management.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
• /
• v.32 no.1
• /
• pp.108-114
• /
• 2016

Sediment-laden water leads to water quality degradation in streams; therefore, best management practices must be implemented in the source area to control nonpoint source pollution. Field monitoring was implemented to measure precipitation, direct runoff, and sediment concentrations at a control plot and straw-applied plot to examine the effect on sediment reduction in this study. A hydrology model, which employs Curve Number (CN) to estimate direct runoff and the Universal Soil Loss Equation to estimate soil loss, was selected. Twenty-five storm events from October 2010 to July 2012 were observed at the control plot, and 14 storm events from April 2011 to July 2011 at the straw-applied plot. CN was calibrated for direct runoff, and the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency and coefficient of determination were 0.66 and 0.68 at the control plot. Direct runoff at the straw-applied plot was calibrated using the percentage direct runoff reduction. The estimated reduction in sediment load by direct runoff reduction calibration alone was acceptable. Therefore, direct runoff-sediment load behaviors in a hydrology model should be considered to estimate sediment load and the reduction thereof.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
• /
• v.44 no.12
• /
• pp.991-1000
• /
• 2011

The relationship between discharge (Q) and suspended sediment (SS) concentration often is used for the estimation of inflow SS concentration in reservoir turbidity modeling in the absence of actual measurements. The power function, SS=aQb, is the most commonly used empirical relation to determine the SS load assuming the SS flux is controlled by variations of discharge. However, Q-SS relation typically is site specific and can vary depending on the season of the year. In addition, the relation sometimes shows hysteresis during rising limb and falling limb for an event hydrograph. The objective of this study was to examine the hysteresis of Q-SS relationships through continuous field measurements during flood events at inflow rivers of Yongdam Reservoir and Soyang Reservoir, and to analyze its effect on the bias of SS load estimation. The results confirmed that Q-SS relations display a high degree of scatter and clock-wise hysteresis during flood events, and higher SS concentrations were observed during rising limb than falling limb at the same discharge. The hysteresis caused significant bias and underestimation of SS loading to the reservoirs when the power function is used, which is important consideration in turbidity modeling for the reservoirs. As an alternative of Q-SS relation, turbidity-SS relation is suggested. The turbidity-SS relations showed less variations and dramatically reduced the bias with observed SS loading. Therefore, a real-time monitoring of inflow turbidity is necessary to better estimate of SS influx to the reservoirs and enhance the reliability of reservoir turbidity modeling.