PREDICTION OF SEDIMENT YIELD

The prediction of sediment yield from catchments is necessary for stud ies of reservoir sedimentation, morphologic modeling, and soil-conserv ation planning. Though records on sediment yield are generally not ava ilable, methods that can be used to predict sediment yield from other commonly available hydrologic data, are available in the literature. I n this study some of these methods are verified for their accuracy, us ing carefully collected data from experimental catchments. It is found that existing methods do not adequately account for the process of se diment delivery; hence these produce a less accurate prediction of sed iment yield. A new method, based on the routing of surface erosion thr ough time-area segments, is proposed. This method is found to produce the sediment yield more accurately than those it has been compared wit h. The method being proposed for the prediction of sediment yield has a more sound basis for further use in distributed models.