Suspended Sediment Modelling Using Soft Computing

Excessive soil erosion combined with immense rate of sedimentation in reservoir and reduced soil fertility from agricultural lands is a serious global problem. Accurate estimation of suspended sediment concentration carried by rivers is of utmost importance in the soil and water conservation practices in the watershed and also in large number of hydro-environmental issues such as planning, design and operations of reservoirs, dams and environmental impact assessment. Therefore, conservation of soil and water and reduction of sediment outflow in watershed systems is increasingly becoming a challenge owing to vibrant and location specific nature of the problem. In this study, an attempt is made to develop ANN, ANFIS, FL, MLR and SRC models using MATLAB for identification of most efficient technique to estimate daily suspended sediment load from Vamsadhara river basin, situated between Mahanadi and Godavari river basins in south India.