Suspended Sediment Loads Through Flood Events for Streams of Sakarya River Basin

Most of the annual sediment yield from a watershed is transported by a stream during a small number of floods that occur in a relatively short period of time in a year. The aim of this article is to determine the possibilities of using only flood discharges for estimating transported suspended sediment loads to obtain easy and quick sediment load data for watershed conservation and reservoir planning studies. In this study, the transported suspended sediment load during flood events is examined, and relations between the annual sediment yield and the sediment load during the major floods in a given year are developed based on available stream suspended sediment data from the Sakarya River basin in Turkey. The importance of floods in the transport of a large percentage of annual sediment load can be illustrated very clearly by constructing cumulative sediment transport curves. In this study, for each station, cumulative sediment transport curves were determined. A total of 45 regression equations were found to estimate annual transported suspended sediment loads using the highest annual flood, two highest annual floods, three highest annual floods, and until ten highest annual floods for subbasins of the Sakarya River basin. From among these equations, seven equations with the highest R2were proposed to estimate annual transported suspended sediment loads.