The use of satellite imagery to assess river sediment discharge is discussed in the context of poorly monitored basins. For more than three decades, the Peruvian hydrological service SENAMHI has been maintaining several gauging stations in the lower part of the Amazon River catchment. This network has been recently supplemented by the Hydro-geodynamics of the Amazon Basin (HYBAM) program, which has a water quality monitoring network distributed over five locations and allows the assessment of river discharge and surface suspended sediment (SSS) concentration. In this paper, the three stations that are located near the confluence of the Marañon and Ucayali Rivers, which form the Amazon River, are reviewed in detail. Two of the stations provide a complete time series of 10-day SSS samples over the studied period. The third station, along the Ucayali River, failed to provide valid estimate...

In Ecuador and Peru, geochemical information from Pacific coastal rivers is limited and scarce. Here, we present an unedited database of major element concentrations from five HYBAM observatory stations monitored monthly between 4 and 10 years, and the discrete sampling of 23 Andean rivers distributed along the climate gradient of the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Pacific coasts. Concentration (C) vs. discharge (Q) relationships of the five monitored basins exhibit a clear dilution behavior for evaporites and/or pyrite solutes, while the solute concentrations delivered by other endmembers are less variable. Spatially, the annual specific fluxes for total dissolved solids (TDS), Ca2+, HCO3 −, K+, Mg2+, and SiO2 are controlled on the first order by runoff variability, while Cl−, Na+ and SO4 2− are controlled by the occurrence of evaporites and/or pyrite. The entire Pacific basin in Ecuador...

Formation of mountain ranges results from complex coupling between lithospheric deformation, mechanisms linked to subduction and surface processes: weathering, erosion, and climate. Today, erosion of the eastern Andean cordillera and sub-Andean foothills supplies over 99% of the sediment load passing through the Amazon Basin. Denudation rates in the upper Ucayali basin are rapid, favoured by a marked seasonality in this region and extreme precipitation cells above sedimentary strata, uplifted during Neogene times by a still active sub-Andean tectonic thrust. Around 40% of those sediments are trapped in the Ucayali retro-foreland basin system. Recent advances in remote sensing for Amazonian large rivers now allow us to complete the ground hydrological data. In this work, we propose a first estimation of the erosion and sedimentation budget of the Ucayali River catchment, based on spatial ...

Formation of mountain ranges results from complex coupling between lithospheric deformation, mechanisms linked to subduction and surface processes: weathering, erosion, and climate. Today, erosion of the eastern Andean cordillera and sub-Andean foothills supplies over 99% of the sediment load passing through the Amazon Basin. Denudation rates in the upper Ucayali basin are rapid, favoured by a marked seasonality in this region and extreme precipitation cells above sedimentary strata, uplifted during Neogene times by a still active sub-Andean tectonic thrust. Around 40% of those sediments are trapped in the Ucayali retro-foreland basin system. Recent advances in remote sensing for Amazonian large rivers now allow us to complete the ground hydrological data. In this work, we propose a first estimation of the erosion and sedimentation budget

The aim of the present study is to estimate the export fluxes of major dissolved species at the scale of the Amazon basin, to identify the main parameters controlling their spatial distribution and to identify the role of discharge variability in the variability of the total dissolved solid (TDS) flux through the hydrological cycle. Data are compiled from the monthly hydrochemistry and daily discharge database of the “Programa Climatologico y Hidrologico de la Cuenca Amazonica de Bolivia” (PHICAB) and the HYBAM observatories from 34 stations distributed over the Amazon basin (for the 1983–1992 and 2000–2012 periods, respectively). This paper consists of a first global observation of the fluxes and temporal dynamics of each geomorphological domain of the Amazon basin. Based on mean interannual monthly flux calculations, we estimated that the Amazon basin delivered approximately 27...

Because increasing climatic variability and anthropic pressures have affected the sediment dynamics of large tropical rivers, long-term sediment concentration series have become crucial for understanding the related socioeconomic and environmental impacts. For operational and cost rationalization purposes, index concentrations are often sampled in the flow and used as a surrogate of the cross-sectional average concentration. However, in large rivers where suspended sands are responsible for vertical concentration gradients, this index method can induce large uncertainties in the matter fluxes. Assuming that physical laws describing the suspension of grains in turbulent flow are valid for large rivers, a simple formulation is derived to model the ratio (α) between the depth-averaged and index concentrations. The model is validated using an exceptional dataset (1330 water samples, 249 con...

The aim of this study is to evaluate the ability of the ORCHIDEE land surface model to simulate streamflows over each sub-basin of the Amazon River basin. For this purpose, simulations are performed with a routing module including the influence of floodplains and swamps on river discharge and validated against on-site hydrological measurements collected within the HYBAM observatory over the 1980-2000 period. When forced by the NCC global meteorological dataset, the initial version of ORCHIDEE shows discrepancies with ORE HYBAM measurements with underestimation by 15% of the annual mean streamflow at Óbidos hydrological station. Consequently, several improvements are incrementally added to the initial simulation in order to reduce those discrepancies. First, values of NCC precipitation are substituted by ORE HYBAM daily in-situ rainfall observations from the meteorological services of Am...