Highly seasonal suspended sediment and bed load transport dynamic in tropical mountain catchments

Abstract

Hydrology and sedimentology development have been very limited in Peru in comparison to other sciences due to a lack of reliable suspended sediment data. A new na-tional suspended sediment yield (SSY) dataset (1948-2012) has been collected and processed. Nevertheless, to understand erosion rates across the continent it is im-portant to quantify the total sediment load (TSL) leaving the basin; also, a good knowledge of the transport pro-cesses for hydraulic design is required. Unfortunately, in Peru there is no current measurement of bed load, which could represent from 0% to 100% of the TSL. Field measurements of bed load transport are notoriously diffi-cult and have large uncertainties, because it is both spa-tially and temporally highly variable in mountain catch-ments. This study aimed to quantify and characterize the TSL from the west-central Andes Mountains.