Spatiotemporal Variation in Total Sediment Load Concentration and Related Factors of Shoreline Waters Based on Disorder Power Index

Abstract

Entropy is a property of a system which measures the uncertainty or disorder within the system. In hydraulics, uncertainties occur in flow variables, such as velocity, sediment concentration, wave. Using entropy, it is possible to establish connections between deterministic and probabilistic domains. To describe sediment transport distributional/autocorrelation properties, including scaling behavior both in state and in time, the well-founded physical and mathematical entropy theory is generally used wherein the spatiotemporal disorder power index (STDPI) is considered to have the maximum uncertainty. Effort has been made in this research to propose a novel entropy method capable of accurately calculating the total sediment load concentration (TSLC) in the shoreline region. Accordingly, STDPI and entropy method have been suggested for finding the TSLC to analyze the spatiotemporal patterns/reports based on a shoreline zone case study because STDPI is quite suitable for marine and hydrological ecosystem components analyses. The method makes use of the monthly data of six shoreline sections in Makran Ocean region in the time period between 1970 and 2015 and investigates the spatiotemporal patterns of the wave height and TLSC variables both of which depend on time and play important parts in terrestrial hydrological studies. These variables usually show meaningful spatiotemporal variability, but explanation of their combined performance is not an easy task. As the results show, STDPI can simulate TSLC and wave when concentration, flow conditions, and granulometry vary.