CSDMS 2014 annual meeting poster Sagy Cohen
On the sensitivity of global suspended sediment modeling to dams
James Syvitski, University of Colorado Boulder Colorado, United States.
Albert Kettner, University of Colorado Boulder Colorado, United States.
Abstract:
The WBMsed model is a global, spatially and temporally explicit riverine flux (water, sediment and nutrients) simulator. Among its many input datasets is a dams and reservoir dataset, used to calculates the water balance and the upstream sediment trapping efficiency of a river system. Here we compare results from three simulations: (1) no reservoirs input, (2) the model's original reservoirs input that include only large dams, and (3) a new dam dataset to include over 6600 large and small dams worldwide. The new dams input is based on the Global Reservoir and Dam (GRanD) Database (http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/grand-v1). As expected, the results show that simulations that include dams yields a more accurate predictions of modern fluxes. The results also show that the new dataset have significantly improved the model accuracy in some rivers while having a neutral or, in some cases, negative effect in others.
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