Parameter Optimization of a Bed Load Transport Formula for Nestos River, Greece

In the Second EWaS International Conference (June 2016, Chania, Crete, Greece), the bed load transport formula of Meyer-Peter and Müller (1948) was calibrated with respect to the bed roughness coefficient for Nestos River. The calibration was manual and incremental, taking five measured values of bed load transport rate at a time. In contrast, the present study carries out a nonlinear optimization of two suitable parameters, while utilizing the average value of the roughness coefficient kst found by the manual calibration. Thus, a uniform calibration is attained, by taking at once the totality of the available 68 measurement points. The results did not show any marked fitting improvement in comparison to the previous study. However, considering moving averages of the measured bed load transport values yields a better adjustment of the model to the measured results.