2022 CSDMS meeting-033

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Modeling Future Sediment Transport Variations at a Watershed-Scale: A Preliminary Example from the Chattahoochee River.

Christopher Sheehan, Boston College Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Chestnut Hill Massachusetts, United States. sheehacz@bc.edu



During the 21st century, anthropogenically modulated changes in climate and land cover will drive variations in sediment dynamics throughout rivers, reservoirs, and coastlines. These changes threaten the integrity of dams, levees, and riparian ecosystems, necessitating strategies to help mitigate their associated hazards and to detect and prevent adverse consequences of engineering solutions. In order to optimize these strategies, geomorphologists require calibrated, watershed-scale numerical simulations of sediment transport that can predict how fluvial networks will respond to different forcings throughout their catchments. We aim to develop watershed-scale landscape evolution models of several U.S. rivers to explore how climate and land-use change over the coming decades to centuries will influence sediment delivery to reservoirs, locks, harbors and coasts. The models will be calibrated by historical sediment flux data, allowing them to predict how the fluvial systems will respond to plausible scenarios of future climatic and anthropogenic forcings. Here, we build a preliminary, watershed-scale model of the Chattahoochee River in the southeastern U.S., an ideal catchment due to its recent urban development and sedimentation records near its outlet at Lake Seminole. We devise a procedure for processing USGS NHDPlus HR datasets at the HU4 and HU8 scale for compatibility with Landlab (Hobley et al., 2017; Barnhard et al., 2020), an open-source Python-based Earth surface modeling toolkit. Using NLCD land cover products and historical streamflow and sediment load data, we leverage Landlab’s sediment transport components to construct a model of the Chattahoochee catchment and test its ability to replicate sedimentation records at Lake Seminole. Future versions of this workflow will use a range of projected 21st century precipitation and land cover changes to predict potential variations in future sediment generation, transport, and storage throughout the Chattahoochee watershed and other U.S. rivers.