Abstract
Sediment dynamics play an important role in various aspects of earth system modeling. In this study, we developed a global sediment dynamics model that considers suspended sediment and bedload at short timescales. We validated suspended sediment from four observation stations in the Amazon River basin and over 60 observation stations from around the world based on a variable criteria such as availability of data samples. Our model was able to effectively reproduce seasonality and spatial distribution of suspended sediment flow. However, our global estimate of approximately 4 Bt/a was significantly lower than previous estimates; therefore, we discuss potential causes of this discrepancy, including target time period and discrepancies with previous extrapolated methods. Our newly developed sediment dynamics model could provide a better understanding of global sediment transfer and contributes to various related research fields such as coastal modeling and natural disasters.
Highlights
Rivers play a large role in material transport as well as in the water cycle
Changing the parameters in the opposite way decreases the flow only slightly except for the sediment yield parameter, which reduced the suspended sediment flow to approximately half of CTL. These results indicate that sediment entering rivers because of land erosion affects the amount of suspended sediment flow in the Amazon River basin more than sediment being suspended from the bedload
We assessed the significance of each process to the suspended sediment flow by conducting simulations that exclude each of the following processes: sediment erosion, suspension, deposition, and bedload flow
Summary
Rivers play a large role in material transport as well as in the water cycle. Sediments flowing through rivers carry various nutrients and are vital in the transport of various materials such as carbon and nitrogen from land to the oceans (Walling 2006). Kao and Milliman (2008) stated a Sediment-related studies using various methods such as modeling, observations and remote sensing including those mentioned above have long been conducted on a relatively local scale, focusing on a specific river basin or shoreline (Blum and Roberts 2009; Shrestha et al 2013; Yu et al 2013; Park and Latrubesse 2014). This is partly because sediment movement and its governing factors depend largely on regional characteristics such as river discharge, basin area, lithology, and anthropogenic activities (Milliman and Farnsworth 2011).
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