TOWARDS A NEW APPROACH TO CONSTRUCTING SEDIMENT DISCHARGE RATING CURVES

The Sediment Rating Curve(SRC)s the simplest procedure used to attain a tapir ideaof the behaviour of the sediment regime of a river and its overall catchment. The method isbased on a statistically significant relation between discharge and sediment concentration ofa river.But the analysis of logarithmic data sets and the comparison of different procedures to gain and to improve this method still presents its uncertainties.For a big streamsuch as the Danube with an overall catchment area of 817000 km2 and an averagedischarge of 6500 m3/s at its mouth,improvement of the available sediment rating curvescan simply be reached by relating grouped logarithmic values.The investigations also illustrated that not only long term data sets contain sufficient information to create a usableSRC, even single flood observations can provide excellent data and information on the determination of the sediment regime of a river and its watershed.