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Signature of climate in fluvial suspended sediment records


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Created: Jul 21, 2022 at 5:39 a.m.
Last updated: Feb 12, 2024 at 6:27 p.m.
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Abstract

Arid regions are often characterized by exceptionally high rates of fluvial sediment transport, but the processes responsible for this apparent connection between climate and sediment transport remain unclear. We examined decades of continuous flow records and suspended sediment concentrations from 71 rivers across the United States by comparing the suspended sediment rating curve behavior, quantified using power law coefficients and exponents, to an aridity index. Results indicate that higher aridity correlates with both greater overall suspended sediment concentration and lower sensitivity of concentration to changes in discharge, demonstrating that rivers in arid locations on average have greater suspended sediment transport efficiency across most discharges, and achieve high transport rates at a relatively lower discharge than rivers in temperate climates. Furthermore, based on additional analyses of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), specific suspended sediment yield, and a hydrograph flashiness index, we attribute the relationships between sediment transport and climate primarily to differences in vegetation density, precipitation, and runoff, variables that all influence both sediment supply and riverbed grain sorting. Finally, we note that the observed contrasts in sediment transport behavior likely represent climate-driven differences in the magnitude and frequency of sediment supply rather than annual suspended sediment load, which does not depend significantly on climate. This study highlights a critical connection between multiple interrelated climatic factors and sediment transport, an important finding for future hazard mitigation in a changing climate with rapidly shifting vegetation patterns and hydrology.

Subject Keywords

Coverage

Spatial

Coordinate System/Geographic Projection:
WGS 84 EPSG:4326
Coordinate Units:
Decimal degrees
Place/Area Name:
United States (including AK, HI, & PR)
North Latitude
64.2446°
East Longitude
-63.8086°
South Latitude
16.4677°
West Longitude
-160.6641°

Temporal

Start Date:
End Date:

Content

readme.txt

READ-ME FOR "SIGNATURE OF CLIMATE IN FLUVIAL SUSPENDED SEDIMENT RECORDS"

Supplemental resources and data for Chapman & Finnegan (in review): Signature of climate in fluvial suspended sediment records

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This repository primarily contains four types of files/folders:
- SUPPLEMENT: Main folder. All materials contained herein are specifically supplementary information for the submitted paper (listed above).
- Raw data used in analyses (all files in SedData folder, SSC-Q_tables, and WaterData-complete.zip)
- Jupyter Notebooks with example analyses (FlowAnalysis, RiverEntry-Example, RiverSummaries, and SpecificSedimentYield; all are .ipynb files)
- VegetationAnalysis folder: Standalone folder containing the "Vegetation Analysis.ipynb" Jupyter Notebook used to calculate vegetation density via NDVI, plus all necessary accompanying files (includes duplicates from main repository)
- Companion files and folders for the above Jupyter Notebooks (all remaining resources)

Note that folders such as SSC-Q and WaterData are mostly empty; this is to facilitate the execution of Jupyter Notebooks as example code. However, complete versions of these folders after all code has been run (for all ~85 rivers in this study) are also available as zip files (SSC-Q_Plots.zip, found in the Supplement folder, and WaterData.zip, found in the base directory).

Full list of files and folders found below. Please contact William Chapman at walchapman@ucsc.edu with any questions.


SUPPLEMENT
 > Table_S1:	Summary of excluded sites.
 > Table_S2	Summary of sites used in full analysis.
 > SSC-Q_Plots.zip	Folder of regression plots for all 85 sites in this study, with both threshold and non-threshold rating curves included

Raw data:
• SSC-Q_tables: Summaries of all discharge and suspended sediment concentration pairs used in rating curve regression analysis.
• WaterData-complete.zip: large zipped file containing all 15-minute continuous discharge data for all sites found in this study.
• SedData: Suspended sediment data from the US Geological Survey, used in regression analysis. These data are processed further to produce the final tables in "SSC-Q_tables".

Jupyter Notebooks require a particular workflow order, consisting of the following notebooks:
1) RiverEntry-Example.ipynb - For downloading sediment and discharge data for a single site and generating a rating curve
2) FlowAnalysis.ipynb - For calculating Richards-Baker flashiness index
3) SSC_Analyses.ipynb - For analyzing rating curve parameters (k/a) and their relation to climatic variables (aridity, RBI, discharge)
4) SpecificSedimentYield.ipynb - For calculating the specific suspended sediment yield given rating curve parameters and discharge data

Other files/folders necessary for Jupyter Notebooks:
• GAGES-II: Folder with basin information from the USGS GAGES-II database (Falcone, 2011)
• SSC-Q - Folder for rating curve plots
• WaterData – Folder for 15-minute Q data; currently contains just a subset (see "WaterData-complete.zip" for more
• AridityData.txt - Text file containing all USGS IDs, basin information, and calculated Aridity Indices
• p_vals.txt – Text file containing USGS IDs and regression p-values
• RBI_MHQ.txt – Text file containing USGS IDs and Richards-Baker Flashiness Indices based on mean hourly discharge
• meanQ.txt – Text file containing arithmetic and geometric mean discharges for all study sites, calculated using all discharge measurements and using just those within discharge range used for calculating suspended sediment rating curves ("_t")
• SiteList.txt – Main text file containing summarized information on all sites, rating curves, and more (much of which is no longer used in analyses)
• SSY.txt – Text file containing USGS IDs and specific sediment yields. Yields were calculated using both the rating curves for the entire suspended sediment dataset, as well as for just those values within the discharge range used for k/an analysis ("SSY_t"). The former is preferred for further analyses.
• no_flow.txt (obsolete) – Text file with various "no flow" definitions and their corresponding proportions of the year with flow less than that definition of "no flow"
• RiverTools.py – Python script with various functions necessary to run the Jupyter Notebooks above

Related Resources

This resource is referenced by Chapman, W. A. L., & Finnegan, N. J. (2024). The signature of climate in fluvial suspended sediment records. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 129, e2023JF007429. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JF007429

How to Cite

Chapman, W. A. L., N. Finnegan (2024). Signature of climate in fluvial suspended sediment records, HydroShare, http://www.hydroshare.org/resource/3438171971aa4c8e8127d6dda1bada44

This resource is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CC-BY

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