Scaling of sand flux over bedforms- experiments to field scale

Abstract:

Bed forms are one of the few geomorphic phenomena whose field and laboratory geometric scales have significant overlap. This is similarly true for scales of sediment transport. Whether in the lab or field, at low transport stages and high Rouse numbers where suspension is minimal, sand fluxes scale nonlinearly with transport stage. At high transport stages, and low Rouse numbers where suspension is substantial, sand transport scales with rouse number. In intermediate cases deformation of bed forms is a direct result of the exchange of sediment between the classically suspended and bed load volumes. These parameters are straightforwardly measured in the laboratory. However, practical difficulties and cost ineffectiveness often exclude bed-sediment measurements from studies and monitoring efforts aimed at estimating sediment loads in rivers. An alternative to direct sampling is through the measurement of evolution of bed topography constrained by sediment-mass conservation. Historically, the topographic-evolution approach has been limited to systems with negligible transport of sand in suspension. As was shown decades ago, pure bed load transport is responsible for the mean migration of trains of bed forms when no sediment is exchanged between individual bed forms. In contrast, the component of bed-material load that moves in suspension is responsible for changes in the size, shape, and spacing of evolving bed forms; collectively this is called deformation. The difference between bed-load flux and bed-material-load flux equals the flux of suspended bed material. We give a partial demonstration of this using available field and laboratory data and comparing them across geometric and sediment transport scales.