A New Hydrological Method for Estimating the River Bed and Drainage Basin Components of Erosion and Suspended Sediment Fluxes in River Basins

This paper uses the results of river suspended sediment flux (ssf) analysis to propose a new hydrological method forquantitatively estimating the river bed and drainage basin (sheet erosion, rill and gully erosion) components of total erosion intensityin river basins. the suggested method is based on the establishment of the functional power connection between mean monthly waterdischarges (wd, qi) and suspended sediment fluxes (ri) calculated for the low-water-discharge phases of a river's hydrologicalregime in various (on mean annual water discharges) years: ri = a×qi ( where a, ? are some empirical coefficients), and further)extrapolation of this connection for other phases of the hydrological regime. thus, the extrapolation allows us to calculate (in a longtermannual ssf) the proportions of sediments originating in river beds and drainage basins. the proposed method is tested using along-term (not less than 10 years) series of observations for wd and ssf of 124 chiefly small and midsize rivers of the east-european plain, the urals, the eastern carpathians, the ciscaucasia and the caucasus, and central asian mountains, containing dataon the mean monthly values of wd and ssf. the paper also compares the method with other methods for estimating the componentsof erosion intensity and ssf.