JWSS - Journal of Water and Soil Science

Since the development of surface water control needs accurate access to flow behavior of sediment rates, the lack of sediment measurement stations, the novelty of most stations and the lack of statistics on the deposit make it difficult to properly evaluate and simulate the flow behavior and their sediments. In a watershed, the morphological characteristics and sediment load of flow affect each other. It is, thus, important to know about the extent of this relationship to manage and control the flow in downstream areas. In the present study, using artificial neural networks and sediment rating regression methods based on the data from 136 events and also morphological parameters, we have attempted to predict the sediment load of Bagh Abbas basin. In the first step, we used flow data to predict the sediment load of both methods, and then basin morphological characteristics such as the compactness factor and form factor were added to the models. The results of this study showed that by using neural networks of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) type with Levenberg – Marquardt algorithm and the stimulation function of tangent Sigmoid with two hidden layers and four neurons in each layer, we can predict suspended sediment discharge rate with a sufficient accuracy. Accuracy of the results obtained from the ANN method was higher than the accuracy of rating curve method. In the evaluation of NGANN & GANN network methods and SRC & MARS regression methods, correlation coefficients were respectively calculated as 0.94, 0.93, 0.767, 0.766, and root mean square errors (RMSE), 0.45, 0.49, 2.3 and 2.3. Nash coefficient (NS) was calculated respectively as 0.71, 0.58, 0.27 and 0.23. Therefore, the most efficient method among the four models is artificial neural network combined with morphological data (GANN). Furthermore, the findings of the study show that adding geomorphological parameters to sediment rating has little effect on the model performance.

Soil erosion is undoubtedly one of the most important problems in natural areas of Iran and has destructive effects on different ecosystems. Considering that calculation of the sediment rate in sediment stations and direct measurements of erosion process is costly and difficult, it is critical to find ways to accurately estimate the amount of sediment yield in catchments especially in arid and hyper arid areas because of their high ecological sensitivity. One of the most commonly used methods in these areas is the sediment rating regression method. Therefore, in this study sediment observed data for 48 events (the corresponding discharge and sediment) in a 23-year period from Fkhrabad basin (Mehriz) were compared to the estimated data obtained from Multi-line rating method, extent middle class, middle class rating curve with correction factor QMLE, SMEARING correction coefficient FAO and Artificial Neural networks (ANNs). Finally, the accuracy of these methods were assessed using different evaluation criteria such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2) and the standard Nash (ME). Results showed that ANN outperformed the other methods with the RMSE, R2 and ME of 203.3, 0.86 and 0.66, respectively. The results suggest that these methods should be used cautiously in estimating the suspended sediment load in arid and hyper arid regions due to the nature of the observed data and temporal and seasonal flow systems in these regions. It was also indicated that the artificial neural network models have higher flexibility than other methods which makes them to be useful tools for modeling in poor data conditions.