Physical and Geochemical Characteristics of the Brahmaputra River Basin

Abstract: The Brahmaputra River suffers a dramatic change in elevation before it enters India along the eastern syntaxis where it exhumes large amounts of sediments which it eventually deposits along the plains of Assam and Bangladesh. This river system is one of the largest in the world with a high specific discharge and experiences several long-duration floods during monsoon, causing enormous damage to infrastructure, agriculture and livelihood of the inhabitants of low-lying areas in the flood plains. Physical studies carried out on the Brahmaputra river basin have utilised a single hydrological model to simulate the daily discharge. Relying on a single model often leads to predictions that capture some phenomena at the expense of others. Multi-model ensemble hydrological simulation has been an effective method for improving simulation accuracy. Geochemical characteristics related to the major ion chemistry and radioisotope systematics in this river have been previously studied, but none of these studies has focussed on using geochemistry to study flood events that occur annually in the Brahmaputra. The aim is to simultaneously dwell on the physical and geochemical characteristics of the river basin. This enables one to address and investigate questions based on geochemical attributes that may otherwise not be answered using a purely physical modeling approach.

Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/05/2019
12:00 am - 4:00 pm