Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

Rivers captured our imagination for centuries. The relationship between movement of water and sediment create complexities that refresh our souls, pique our interest, and demand our attention. The study and understanding of complexities, such as sediment transport, requires the collection of data. Over the decades, the techniques for collecting sediment data have been refined and more recently surrogate techniques have expanded the temporal range of the collected data. One of the more promising surrogate technologies is active acoustics, which have been successfully tested in a variety of fluvial environments, including gravel and sand bed rivers, where morphological changes are minimal. Application of this technology to shallow sand bed rivers though has been limited to areas where the local geology provides a sufficient flow depth at various discharge stages and the local morphology is stable. A site was identified on the Middle Rio Grande that provided the opportunity to explore the robustness of the developed technology in recording continuous suspended sediment data in an environment where the morphology is not stable. Challenges were present in implementation of the developed technology, but with some caveats the developed technology can be utilized in shallow sand rivers with changing morphology.