PREDICTION OF SEDIMENT YIELD

The prediction of sediment yield from catchments is necessary for studies of reservoir sedimentation, morphologic modeling, and soil-conservation planning. Though records on sediment yield are generally not available, methods that can be used to predict sediment yield from other commonly available hydrologic data, are available in the literature. In this study some of these methods are verified for their accuracy, using carefully collected data from experimental catchments. It is found that existing methods do not adequately account for the process of sediment delivery; hence these produce a less accurate prediction of sediment yield. A new method, based on the routing of surface erosion through time-area segments, is proposed. This method is found to produce the sediment yield more accurately than those it has been compared with. The method being proposed for the prediction of sediment yield has a more sound basis for further use in distributed models.