Estimation of suspended sediment concentration in Guamá River in the Amazon region

Monitoring of the suspended sediment concentration (SSC) is important for the analysis of morphological processes in watersheds and rivers, river habitats, and human activities associated with river management. Acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCP) are used for measurements of flow and velocity in rivers through acoustic waves, which can also be converted into sediment concentrations. In this context, the objective is to verify the applicability of the use of ADCPs (Sontek YSI, model M9 River Surveyor) as an alternative for SSC estimates, this being a recent application of the equipment, mainly in rivers in the Amazon region rich in sediments in suspension. Thus, the Gartner method was used, calibrating its equation with the concentrations obtained by the point sampling method, collected with a bottle of Van Dorn in the Guamá River, Amazon, Brazil. The method used to obtain the SSC with data measured via ADCP resulted in a satisfactory estimate of the concentrations. The correlations between the measured and estimated sediment concentrations had R² = 0.6827 for point sampling method and R² = 0.8103 for vertically averaged SSC. These satisfactory results demonstrate the potential of using ADCP to estimate sediments suspended in Amazon basin.