The characteristics of extreme erosion events in a small mountainous watershed.

A large amount of soil loss is caused by a small number of extreme events that are mainly responsible for the time compression of geomorphic processes. The aim of this study was to analyze suspended sediment transport during extreme erosion events in a mountainous watershed. Field measurements were conducted in Wangjiaqiao, a small agricultural watershed (16.7 km(2)) in the Three Gorges Area (TGA) of China. Continuous records were used to analyze suspended sediment transport regimes and assess the sediment loads of 205 rainfall-runoff events during a period of 16 hydrological years (1989-2004). Extreme events were defined as the largest events, ranked in order of their absolute magnitude (representing the 95(th) percentile). Ten extreme erosion events from 205 erosion events, representing 83.8% of the total suspended sediment load, were selected for study. The results of canonical discriminant analysis indicated that extreme erosion events are characterized by high maximum flood-suspended sediment concentrations, high runoff coefficients, and high flood peak discharge, which could possibly be explained by the transport of deposited sediment within the stream bed during previous events or bank collapses.

[Temporal variations of clay content in eroded sediment under different rainfall condition].

Erosion and sediment characteristics were measured using simulated rainfall on two cultivated soils from the Loess Plateau, China. The size distribution of eroded sediment (non-dispersed) was compared with equivalent measurements of the same samples after chemical and mechanical dispersion(dispersed) to investigate the aggregation ratio (AR) and enrichment ratio (ER). Results show that clay content is increasing with the length and rainfall intensity. The loessial soil increased by 8.77% and 2.43%, but the Lou soil increased by only 2.76% and 0.4%. With the increase of slope, the clay content of the two loess reduced by 4.91% and 3.93%, respectively. AR values were less than 1 and ER values were greater than 1. These indicated that relatively slight clay dispersion occurred and that most of the clay in the sediments was in the form of aggregates. The results will improve understanding of erosion and sedimentation processes, which in turn will improve erosion modeling. Knowledge of temporal variations of clay in sediment can also provide the basis for understanding and modeling the transfer of nutrients on hillslope.