Hydrological and hydraulic characterization in semiarid regions: Comparison of sediment transport formulae

© 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, London. In semiarid regions with steep morphology and irregular rainfall regime areas, the floods are presented with high proportion of solid materials transport. Furthermore, climate change will increases flash floods phenomenon, and will make necessary to control them to minimize their destructive effects. In order to design effective control and intake systems in semiarid regions, it is necessary to know hydrologic and hydraulic characteristics of ephemeral rivers. According to the problem, some semiarid Mediterranean basins were studied in order to establish general criteria of calculation in these regions. Based on the results obtained in these basins with distributed and aggregated hydrologic models, in this paper the authors analyze the main hydrological and hydraulic properties, and discuss the formulations of roughness coefficients. Besides this, the authors compare sediment transport obtained with classical formulae and numerical simulations applied in ephemeral streams.