A combined use of acoustic and optical devices to investigate suspended sediment in rivers

The use of acoustic and optic devices has become more and more common for estimating suspended sediment loads in rivers. The echo intensity levels (EIL) recorded by means of an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) have been applied in different methods, which provided relationships between scattering particles features derived from samples (i.e., concentration and grain size) and corresponding backscattering strength and sound attenuation. At the same time, the laser diffraction was applied by an in-stream sampler (LISST-SL) to measure suspended sediment concentration and the corresponding particle size distribution (PSD). These two techniques exhibited different limitations in terms of the measured range of concentration, sensitivity to a certain spectrum of particle sizes, and instruments deploy feasibility especially in large rivers, in a way that the use of sampled PSD by LISST-SL to validate ADCP methods may not be trivial. The aim of this study was to combine the vertical profiling of EIL by an ADCP with results from LISST-SL, eventually demonstrating the possibility of using moving ADCP measurements to detect different suspended matters along a Danube River section characterized by a small tributary junction. At the same time, this work elucidates optical to acoustic method deviations that hinders an actual validation of ADCP methods based on LISST-SL rather than with physical samplings.