MeetingOfInterest:Meeting-010

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International Conference Sediment Transport Modeling in Hydrological Watersheds and Rivers

Istanbul, Turkey
14 - 16 November 2012

Deadlines Abstract submission: The abstract submission deadline has passed Registration: Registration is now closed Official website http://www.medfriend.itu.edu.tr/

Soil erosion from hillslopes in hydrological watersheds, one of the most serious problems of today's world, consists of motion of soil particles detached by factors such as rainfall, runoff, wind and transported within flow to finally be deposited either at a downstream section of the river with a lower topographical slope or in a downstream river reservoir. The dead storage volume of river reservoirs is of great importance in the design work. It is such a volume that accomodates the sediment trapped by and accumulated in the reservoir. Neither underestimation nor overestimation of this volume is desired as the underestimation shortens the economical project life of the reservoir and the overestimation results in unneccessary costs.

Numerous methods are available to quantify that amount of sediment. This might be either by analysing a time series; correlating the collection of available data; employing empirical approaches and traditional equations; monitoring, sampling, surveying; or remote sensing and using geographical information systems. Additionally, process-based hydrological watershed models accomodate erosion and sediment transport modules in which sediment, eroded by rainfall or flow, and transported, over the hillslope and through the existing river channel, to the reservoir can be predicted. Also soft computational techniques such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms and wavelet functions were found useful in establishing a model for forecasting or simulation purposes.

The general topic deals with the modeling of sediment transport in hydrological watersheds, knowing that erosion / sediment transport is a major problem in the Mediterranean countries. This is a widely studied area, but the modeling sediment transport is a domain with less specific and largely used knowledge. Thus the general objective of this meeting is to gather not only regional but also worldwide researchers and practitioners working on this topic at different scales of time and space, in order to identify and compare tools and methodologies applied in the region and other parts in the world, and to edit the main contributions as a set of papers to give future studies a good overview.