Assessment of sediment transfer based on discharge indices for Cauvery River basin, India

The mechanism of sediment transport is mainly governed by surface water flow within the river basins. Excessive sediment transport plays an important role in reducing the carrying capacity of channel networks, storage capacity of reservoirs/dams. An important task for most of the hydrologists is to determine the reliable stream flow estimate which causes majority of the sediment transport within river basins/stream channels. The transport effectiveness of a stream flow event of a particular magnitude in carrying a sediment load is defined as the product of the effect of that event (i.e. sediment transport rate corresponding to the stream flow event) and the frequency with which the event occurs. This approach is famously known as magnitude frequency analysis (MFA). MFA provides a mathematical framework to determine various discharge indices such as effective discharge, fraction-load discharge and functional-equivalent discharge. These indices provide information on long-term transport of sediments through river networks and are linked to the exponent of sediment rating curve (which is correlated to the size of sediments, bed armouring and river morphology). Effective discharge index represents that single discharge which carries the most amounts of sediments, whereas fraction-load discharge and functional-equivalent discharge indices deal with mean sediment load which considers the contribution of entire probability distribution of discharge. There is a dearth of attempts to study these discharge indices for Indian catchments. In the present study, lognormal distribution and Gamma distribution -based MFA approaches are used to estimate discharge indices for Cauvery River basin, India. Effectiveness of the approaches was assessed based on their ability to predict discharge indices for 12 catchments in the river basin. Results indicate that Gamma distribution-based approach provides reliable estimates of fraction-load discharge and functional-equivalent discharge. The fraction-load discharges were computed for the catchments by considering various fractions of sediment loads ranging from 10% to 90%. Plots of cumulative sediment yield were prepared for both approaches and compared with empirical cumulative sediment yield. It was observed that the Gamma distribution-based MFA approach tends to provide close match with the empirical yield.