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An Automated Measuring System for Soil Erosion and Runoff Processes in Watershed and Its Laboratory Applications

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  Paper number  052057,  2005 ASAE Annual Meeting . (doi: 10.13031/2013.18908) @2005
Authors:   P L Gao, T W Lei, M A Shao, J Zhao, C Yang, L Q Qu, L J Yan
Keywords:   Soil erosion, Runoff, Watershed, Automated measuring system

Although the difficulties, the temporal and spatial knowledge of runoff rate, flow velocity and sediment concentration or sediment yield in watersheds during the rainfall-runoff-soil erosion processes is of great importance for understanding the soil erosion mechanism. Their onsite and accurate measurements will provide very much demanded data for physically based soil erosion simulation/prediction models. An automated system is presented in this paper for the measurements of the factors affecting soil erosion dynamic processes. The whole measurement system consists of weir and water level sensor systems for runoff rates; shallow water flow velocity measuring systems for flow velocities in hill-slope rills and/or watershed water channels; sediment concentration measuring systems for sediment concentrations at designed locations; and data acquisition systems for the control and data logging of the systems. A laboratory watershed model was constructed to run the demo experiments. The detailed information concerning the arrangements of the sensors in the watershed is given. The data logged by the system were compared with the manuallymeasured ones to illustrate the feasibility and the accuracy of the system. Also, the measured runoff and sediment data from the watershed under simulated rainfall were shown to illustrate the runoff and sedimentation processes. The primary results indicated that the system is promising to be applicable in the study of soil erosion dynamic processes.

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