Characterizing riverbed sediment using high-frequency acoustics 2: scattering signatures of Colorado River bed sediment in Marble and Grand Canyons

Journal of Geophysical Research F: Earth Surface
By: , and 

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Abstract

In this, the second of a pair of papers on the statistical signatures of riverbed sediment in high-frequency acoustic backscatter, spatially explicit maps of the stochastic geometries (length- and amplitude-scales) of backscatter are related to patches of riverbed surfaces composed of known sediment types, as determined by geo-referenced underwater video observations. Statistics of backscatter magnitudes alone are found to be poor discriminators between sediment types. However, the variance of the power spectrum, and the intercept and slope from a power-law spectral form (termed the spectral strength and exponent, respectively) successfully discriminate between sediment types. A decision-tree approach was able to classify spatially heterogeneous patches of homogeneous sands, gravels (and sand-gravel mixtures), and cobbles/boulders with 95, 88, and 91% accuracy, respectively. Application to sites outside the calibration, and surveys made at calibration sites at different times, were plausible based on observations from underwater video. Analysis of decision trees built with different training data sets suggested that the spectral exponent was consistently the most important variable in the classification. In the absence of theory concerning how spatially variable sediment surfaces scatter high-frequency sound, the primary advantage of this data-driven approach to classify bed sediment over alternatives is that spectral methods have well understood properties and make no assumptions about the distributional form of the fluctuating component of backscatter over small spatial scales.

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Publication type Article
Publication Subtype Journal Article
Title Characterizing riverbed sediment using high-frequency acoustics 2: scattering signatures of Colorado River bed sediment in Marble and Grand Canyons
Series title Journal of Geophysical Research F: Earth Surface
DOI 10.1002/2014JF003191
Volume 119
Issue 12
Year Published 2014
Language English
Publisher American Geophysical Union
Contributing office(s) Southwest Biological Science Center
Description 19 p.
First page 2692
Last page 2710
Country United States
State Arizona
Other Geospatial Grand Canyon, Marble Canyon
Online Only (Y/N) N
Additional Online Files (Y/N) N
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