Quantifying effects of water and sediment regulation scheme on the sand bar in the yellow river estuary in 2014

摘要

Water and sediment regulation scheme (WSRS) is an annual water conservancy project which aims to alleviate sand depositions and reduce flood risks in the Yellow River of China since 2002. There are few researches on the sand bar within Yellow River tail channel and its estuary from each WSRS effect, though these relative researches are important to be carried out for a better understanding of WSRS. By interpreting two GF-1 satellite images in the end of 2013 and the start of 2015 after carefully controlling some potential bias factors from the change of water level, precipitation or tidal, we compared and analyzed the change of sand bars by one WSRS implemented in 2014 in this paper. Our results indicated this WSRS changed obviously the area/shape of sand bars. It made the area of the river sand bar decreased totally by 5.55 km(2), while the estuarine sand bar increased by 2.08 km(2). And it achieved the highest scour efficiency (90.11%) in the straight channel, but it achieved the lowest scour efficiency (44.71%) in the more bends channel. From the prospect in the change of estuarine sand bar, the west side area increased, while the east side area shrank. There were some broken small sand bars on the north side and they were forming a large sand bar. (C) 2019 European Regional Centre for Ecohydrology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.