How Fast or How Many? Sources of Intermittent Sediment Transport
Name
Geophysical Research Letters - 2023 - Benavides - How Fast or How Many Sources of Intermittent Sediment Transport.pdf
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1.34 MB
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Author(s)
Benavides, Santiago J.
Deal, Eric
Venditti, Jeremy G.
Bradley, Ryan
Zhang, Qiong
Kamrin, Ken
Perron, J. Taylor
Date Issued
May 2023
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
Citation
Benavides, S. J., Deal, E., Venditti, J. G., Bradley, R., Zhang, Q., Kamrin, K., & Perron, J. T. (2023). How fast or how many? Sources of intermittent sediment transport. Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2022GL101919.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Near the threshold of grain motion, sediment transport is “on‐off” intermittent, characterized by large but rare bursts separated by long periods of low transport. Without models that can account for the effects of intermittency, measurements of average sediment flux can be in error by up to an order of magnitude. Despite its known presence and impact, it is not clear whether on‐off intermittency arises from the grain activity (the number of moving grains) or grain velocities, which together determine the sediment flux. We use laboratory flume experiments to show that the on‐off intermittency has its origins in the velocity distributions of grains that move by rolling along the bed, whereas grain activity is not on‐off intermittent. Incorporating the types of intermittency we identify into stochastic models of sediment transport could yield improved predictions of sediment flux, including physically based estimates of the uncertainty in time‐averaged sediment flux.
Subjects
General Earth and Planetary Sciences
Geophysics
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2022gl101919
