"Proceedings, Federal Interagency Workshop,
"Sediment Technology for the 21'st Century,"
St. Petersburg, FL, February 17-19, 1998"

Interferometric Rotary Scanning Sonar for Bedload Transport Investigations

By George Tate

Pre-Proposal

Issue/Problem

There is no satisfactory method of determining sediment transport rates in sand bed systems.

Beneficiaries

Agencies with interests in maintaining navigation channels, determining sediment inputs to/from riverine channel reaches, and agencies involved in oceanic and estuarine sediment and pollution transport investigations.

Objectives

Develop a robust field deployable instrument system that will image active bedform fields in a variety of environments including marine coastal, nearshore and estuarine as well as rivers and navigable waterways that permits sediment fluxes to be determined.

Approach

Researchers within USGS have developed control and data acquisition technologies to image sedimentary bedforms using commercial sonar equipment. Software will be developed to record and process these interferometric isophase data and produce xyz coordinate data arrays that can be used to produce fine scale bathymetric maps of migratory bedform fields. Time series, sequential maps will them be used to calculate volumetric changes and migration rates of individual bedforms which can be used to determine sediment transport rates.

Funding

FY-99 will require $20K for software development and $5K for field testing (assuming use of existing hardware: Sonar $10K, data acquisition system $2.5K, platform $1K).

Principal Investigator

Dave Rubin and George Tate, USGS,

upWorkshop Contributions

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