All Datasets

Physical experiments on fill-terrace formation and sediment-signal disruption

Supporting information for the project ‘Physical experiments on fill-terrace formation and sediment-signal disruption’

This data collection contains topographic scans, overhead photographs and experiment documentation of the experiments published in Tofelde, S., Savi, S., Wickert, A., Bufe, A., Schildgen, T., 2019. Alluvial channel response to environmental perturbations: Fill-terrace formation and sediment-signal disruption. ESurf.
The experiments were run in November and December 2015 at Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory, Minneapolis, USA. The experimental setup consisted of a wooden box with dimensions of 4 m x 2.5 m x 0.4 m that was filled with quartz sand with a mean grain size of 144 μm. At the inlet, water discharge (Qw) and sediment supply (Qs,in) could be regulated separately. At the 20 cm wide outlet sediment discharge (Qs,out) could be measured and the base level could be controlled. The water was dyed blue to better distinguish wet from dry areas.
This dataset contains seven experiments. In each experiment, we varied either upstream water discharge (Qw), upstream sediment supply (Qs,in) or downstream base level. For each experiment, we provide an experiment log sheet, the topographic laser scans, overhead photographs and time-lapse movies. Details on each dataset are given below.

1. Experiment documentation
The metadata for each experiment is summarized in an excel spreadsheet. For each experiment, we provide the input parameters (Qs,in and Qw), the bed elevation at the inlet and outlet and the according bed slope (assuming a straight channel), sediment discharge at the outlet (Qs,out) and the start and stop times to perform the topographic laser scans.

2. Topographic scans
Laser scans were performed every 30 minutes (exception base-level fall experiment, 10 to 15 min) using a custom built laser scanner. The scans were acquired in five parallel, overlapping swaths that were merged afterwards (merged scans provided here). The experiments had to be interrupted to acquire the scans (absolute times given in the excel spreadsheet). The horizontal resolution is 1 mm and the scans cover 1700 by 3400 pixels, cutting 300 pixels at the upstream and downstream end, respectively. Scans are numbered with the numbers given in the excel spreadsheet.

3. Overhead photographs
Overhead photographs were acquired every 20 seconds using a fish-eye lens. The distorted photos were ortho-rectified in Adobe Photoshop using an inbuilt lens correction and were resampled at a 1 mm horizontal resolution (corrected photos provided here). Photos are named by date and absolute time and are provided in jpg format (e.g. Img2015-12-05 11.45.49
copy.jpg). Each folder contains two additional text files containing the image names and the according experimental runtime in seconds. Photos taken without running water, or when the dye was not working, were removed. No photos were taken for the Ctrl_1 experiment due to an error in the camera installation.

4. Time-lapse movies
In addition, time lapse videos of each run were generated by stitching the overhead photos together. Movies were generated from the unprocessed photos and are thus for display only, not for analyses.

TDB_16_4

The Mud People

Sometimes you can over-analyze data... SEAD leverages Clowder which includes a broad range of automated metadata extractor/pattern recognition tools. If you happen to run the ones that look for faces on your data from river delta growth experiments, you may find more than you bargained for!

I like mp1, mp4, and mp7...

TDB_16_3

TDB-16-3: Fan-delta experiment performed in Tulane University Delta Basin. Experiment evolved under constant forcings of water (0.17 l/s), mean sediment (1.41 kg/hr), and long term sea-level rise rate (0.25 mm/hr). Experiment run time was 875 hr. Experiment used a strongly cohesive sediment that had a wide grain size distribution with a median diameter of 65 microns. Sediment supply rate remained constant until run hour 140. During run hour 140-385 sediment supply followed a sine wave pattern with period of 24.5 hrs and peak-to-peak amplitude of 0.87 kg/h. During run hour 385-875, sediment supply followed a sine wave pattern with period of 98 hr and peak-to-peak amplitude of 0.43 kg/hr. Experiment performed to explore interaction of autogenic sediment transport with sediment supply cycles and resulting stratigraphy with topography monitored every 1 hour of run time.

TDB_16_2

TDB-16-2: Fan-delta experiment performed in Tulane University Delta Basin. Experiment evolved under constant forcings of water discharge (0.17 l/s), mean sediment supply (1.41 kg/hr), and long term sea-level rise rate (0.25 mm/hr). Experiment run time was 630 hr. Experiment used a strongly cohesive sediment that had a wide grain size distribution with a median diameter of 65 microns. Sediment supply during the final 490 hrs followed a sine wave pattern with period of 98 hrs and peak-to-peak amplitude of 0.22 kg/h. Experiment performed to explore interaction of autogenic sediment transport with sediment supply cycles and resulting stratigraphy with topography monitored every 1 hour of run time.

TDB_16_1

TDB-16-1: Fan-delta experiment performed in Tulane University Delta Basin. Experiment evolved under constant forcings of water (0.17 l/s), mean sediment (1.41 kg/hr), and long term sea-level rise rate (0.25 mm/hr). Experiment run time was 630 hr. Experiment used a strongly cohesive sediment that had a wide grain size distribution with a median diameter of 65 microns. Sediment supply during the final 490 hrs followed a sine wave pattern with period of 24.5 hrs and peak-to-peak amplitude of 0.22 kg/h. Experiment performed to explore interaction of autogenic sediment transport with sediment supply cycles and resulting stratigraphy with topography monitored every 1 hour of run time.

Greater Blue Earth and Lake Pepin sediment fingerprinting data

These data include grain size, meteoric Beryllium-10 concentrations, excess Lead-210 activities, and Cesium-137 activities for 158 sediment samples collected from within the Greater Blue Earth watershed and Lake Pepin, in southern Minnesota.

Cross sections of the Le Sueur and Maple Rivers, Minnesota

A total of 44 cross-sections were surveyed on the Le Sueur and Maple rivers, near Mankato, Minnesota in 2008 and again in 2015. The cross sections were initially measured in 2008 to support development of a watershed sediment budget (Belmont et al., 2011; Gran et al., 2011) and a numerical sediment routing model (Viparelli et al., 2014). The flood of record occurred in 2010, with several other large floods in subsequent years. So the cross-sections were repeated in 2015 in an effort to quantify morphological changes in the channel to inform development of a morphodynamic channel-floodplain model (Call et al., 2017). In each survey, a total of 20 bankfull cross-section surveyed on the Le Sueur River and another 24 cross sections were surveyed on the Maple River.

Steady and transient sand bedform evolution at Clear Run, North Carolina, September 2009

The evolution of sand bedforms through time was observed through time-lapse overhead camera imagery at Clear Run, a small, sand-bedded stream in Wilmington, North Carolina, USA. These observations were made as part of a larger study of "hyporheic" (i.e., surface-subsurface) solute and fine particle exchange through the injection and tracking of tracer solutes and particles in the stream channel. In particular, two scenarios were considered for observing hyporheic exchange and associated bedform evolution: (1) steady background "base" flow conditions, and (2) time-varying "flood wave" conditions associated with the opening of an artificial dam upstream of the observation section on the stream. The overall study is described in Harvey et al. (2012, Journal of Geophysical Research 117, G00N11, doi:10.1029/2012JG002043).

This dataset contains processed images for the steady and transient bedform evolution observed at Clear Run on September 18, 2009. The images provided here were captured with a Nikon D5000 camera looking downward from approximately 2.5m above the stream bed. Time-lapse images were captured every 30 seconds. The images were rotated to align with the stream channel geometry and cropped to remove the stream banks and other non-bedform components of the image. Steady-flow images were further processed to normalize for variation in lighting. Specific details for each set of images are provided here:

(1) Steady base flow observations (individual .jpg images contained in folder "ClearRunSteady_CroppedRotatedNorm")
Images numbered 12 to 588 (577 total images, numbers increasing through time) were captured at 30-second intervals during steady base flow conditions on 18 September 2009, starting at 11:00:32 AM local time (Eastern Daylight Time). In all images, flow is from left to right. The vertical (spanwise) extent of the images is 2664 pixels (175.0 cm), and the horizontal (streamwise) extent is 1520 pixels (99.9 cm), based on a conversion factor of 0.0657 cm/pixel.

(2) Transient flood wave observations (individual .jpg images contained in folder "ClearRunFlood_CroppedRotated")
Images numbered 1 to 300 (300 total images, numbers increasing through time) were captured at 30-second intervals during the artificially-induced dam-release flood wave on 18 September 2009, starting at 4:08:32 PM local time (Eastern Daylight Time). In all images, flow is from left to right. The vertical (spanwise) extent of the images is 2904 pixels (201.8 cm), and the horizontal (streamwise) extent is 1612 pixels (112.0 cm), based on a conversion factor of 0.0695 cm/pixel.

An additional metadata file ("ClearRun_metadata.xlsx") provides timing information for each of the photos in the steady and transient flow collections.

Transient Flows Unimodal sediment

Sediment transport experiments with variable water discharge conducted at St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota. These experiments explore the effects of flood hydrograph shape on bed-load transport dynamics. The dataset is composed of over 200 individual experimental runs with varying discharge and sediment feed rates for a unimodal sediment mixture with a median size of 7 mm. Raw data included in this data set for each experimental flood includes time series of varying water level and force on the load cell due to the accumulating sediment flux. These data are processed into time series of water depth, dimensional and dimensionless stress, sediment mass, and sediment flux for each run. Accompanying these data are topographic scans of the sediment bed of 1 mm vertical and spatial resolution.

Diamond Creek Repeat Multibeam Data

Bed Elevation grids from March and July 2015 sampling missions upstream of the Diamond Creek USGS sediment gage.
Colorado River, Grand Canyon National Park.
Matlab scripts used to calculate bedload flux from RMB, SB, and MSB bed elevation profiles.

Data and scripts provided to carry out the methods of Leary & Buscombe "Practical Guidelines for Estimating Sand Bedload in Rivers by Tracking Dunes", submitted to Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, Feb. 2017.

This work was funded by the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program administered by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Geological Survey Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. government.

Questions regarding this dataset? Contact Kate Leary at learykcp@asu.edu

Measurements of Particle Motions

Measurements of particle motions were obtained using a manual tracking method within the program ImageJ. The data include 1250 frames or 5 seconds of high-speed imagery, associated coordinates of particle motions, and derived measurements of particle motions (e.g. instantaneous velocities, particle accelerations, hop distances, and travel times). These are associated with figures posted in this file and also within our paper ''Experimental evidence of statistical ensemble behavior in bed load sediment transport'', DOI: 10.1002/2015JF003552.