The University of Stuttgart have incorporated seasonal snow memory into the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) and combined it with the SEdiment Delivery Distributed (SEDD) model in a recent scientific publication. The inclusion of snow-related processes, especially the separation of non-erosive snowfall from erosive snowmelt, was found to greatly enhance model accuracy. These results represent a major improvement for estimating suspended sediment loads, especially in data-sparse regions, further enhanced by the use of freely available satellite imagery and climate reanalysis datasets. These results are important for DIRT-X applications as long-term predictions of bathymetric change, necessary when modeling climate change scenarios, will require an objective calculation procedure for the sediment load as a function of a catchment’s specific characteristics and hydroclimatic features.

Read more: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-022-03192-1