Cokriging estimation of daily suspended sediment loads

Abstract

Daily suspended sediment loads (S) were estimated using cokriging (CK) of S with daily river discharge based on weekly, biweekly, or monthly sampled sediment data. They were also estimated with ordinary kriging (OK) and a rating curve method. The estimated daily loads were compared with the daily measured values over a nine-year-period. The results show that the estimated daily sediment loads with the CK using the weekly measured data best matched the measured daily values. The rating curve method based on the same data provides a fairly good match but it tends to underestimate the peak and overestimate the low values. The CK estimation was better than the rating curve because CK considers the temporal correlation among the data values and honors the measured points whereas the rating curve method does not. For the site studied, weekly sampling may be frequent enough for estimating daily sediment loads with CK when daily discharge data is available. The estimated daily loads with CK were less reliable when the sediment samples were taken less frequently, i.e., biweekly or monthly. The OK estimates using the weekly measured data significantly underestimates the daily S because unlike CK and the rating curve, OK makes no use of the correlation of sediment loads with frequently measured river discharge.