Understanding the distribution of seafloor sediment using a side-scan sonar is very important to grasp the distribution of seabed resources. This task is traditionally carried out by a skilled human operator. However, with the appearance of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, automated processing is now needed to tackle the large amount of data produced and to enable on the fly adaptation of the mi...

A geoacoustic inversion technique for high-frequency (12 kHz) multibeam sonar data is presented as a means to classify the seafloor sediment in shallow water (40–300 m). The inversion makes use of backscattered data at a variety of grazing angles to estimate mean grain size. The need for sediment type and the large amounts of multibeam data being collected with the Naval Oceanographic Office’s ...

A detailed laboratory study was conducted to examine the effects of particle size on hysteretic sediment transport under time-varying rainfall. A rainfall pattern composed of seven sequential stepwise varying rainfall intensities (30, 37.5, 45, 60, 45, 37.5, and 30 mm h), each of 20 min duration, was applied to a 5 m 3 2 m soil erosion flume. The soil in the flume was initially dried, ploughed ...

A rapid procedure is described to evaluate the significance of inorganic and organic pollutants in finegrained sediments. The air(< 30° C) or freeze-dried samples are screened within 30 min. in stainless steel sieves (<0.04 mm) prior to chemical analysis. This procedure is also suitable for analysis of such elements as Hg and many non-volatile organic pollutants. The sediment size fraction of <...