Information on suspended sediment load (SSL) is fundamental for numerous water resources management and environmental protection projects. This phenomenon has the inherent complexity due to a large number of vague parameters and existence of both spatial variability of the basin characteristics and temporal climatic patterns. This complexity turns into a barrier to get accurate prediction by conventional linear methods. On the other hand, the extent of the noise on hydrological data reduces the performance of data-driven models like Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Although ANNs could capture the complex nonlinear relationship between input and output parameters, being data-driven method positioned it in a state of need to preprocessed data. In this paper, the application of ANN approach focusing on wavelet- based denoising method for modeling daily streamflow-sediment relationship was proposed. The daily streamflow and SSL data observed at outlet of the Potomac River in USA were used as the case study. Achieving this purpose, Daubechies (db) was used as mother wavelet to decompose both streamflow and sediment time series into detailed and approximation subseries. Decomposition at level ten via db3 and at level eight via db5 were examined for streamflow and SSL time series, respectively. At first, the appropriate input combination with raw data to estimate current SSL was determined and re-imposed to ANN with denoised data. The comparison of results reveals that in term of determination coefficient, the obtained result by denoised data was improved up to 23.2% with raged to use noisy, raw data and this exhibits that denoised data can be employed productively in ANN-based daily SSL forecasting.
Loads of suspended sediment and nutrients from local nonpoint sources to the tidal Potomac River and Estuary, Maryland and Virginia, 1979-81 water years