Estimating sediment transport in the Mogtedo watershed, Burkina Faso

The climate change has highly affected sub-sahelian region in the last decades. The amount of annual rainfall has decresed and dry periods became longer, worstening the living conditions of the inhabitants. Annual rainfall is only concentrated in a short period of the year, named wet season, where many heavy rains occur and cause floods. The intensity of rains doesn't permitt the infiltration of the water, which rapidly flows away, so that paradoxically rainfall is one of the main causes of soil impoverishment and erosion.\\Many small dams were built in Burkina Faso to store water from the wet season to be used in the rest of the year, expecially for irrigation. However, storage capacity of these dams is decreasing as a consequence of sediment trasport from the rivers which provide water to the dams. In the present study some sediment transport data collected by the PADI project in Mogtedo catchment, were there is small dam, were analyzed. Some sediment transport formulas were tested on field data, six of them for total load, three for suspended load and three for bedload. Results of the different formulas were compared and used to find out the formula which better fitted field data.\\The research for a new suspended sediment transport formula and for a new total sediment transport formula was also performed; the new formulas were find out through the analysis of the previously tested existing formulas and the measured data.