Hydraulic Characteristics and Suspended Sediment Loads during Spring Breakup in Several Streams Located on the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, USA

Copyright © 2013 Horacio Toniolo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This article presents results from a broad field campaign involving discharge and surface-water slope measurements, water sampling, and longitudinal river-bed profile surveys. During the spring breakup of 2011, fieldwork was carried out in several pristine streams located in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska; the studied streams cover two main regions: 1) foothills (Ikpikpuk River, Seabee Creek, Prince Creek, and Otuk Creek); 2) coastal plain (Fish Creek, Judy Creek, and Ublutuoch River). Reported data includes basic geometric and hydraulic characteristics such as channel width and depth, cross-sectional area, average velocity, friction factor, shear stress, suspended sediment concentrations from autosamplers and grab samples, and dune dimensions and steepness ratios. The measured discharge in different streams ranged from 2 to 853 m3/s, which corresponded to post-breakup and near peak conditions, respectively. The temporal variation of Manning’s n was in phase with measured discharge, with high values of n associated with the presence of floating ice during the measurements. Calculations indicate that sediment particle sizes ≤ 2 mm moved dur-ing the measurements. In general, variations in discharge were accompanied by changes in suspended sediment concen