Seismic data from the 2016-02-22 flood event and from an active seismic survey conducted around the Eshtemoa River, Israel

Bedload transport is a key process in fluvial morphodynamics and hydraulic engineering, but is notoriously difficult to measure. The recent advent of stream-side seismic monitoring techniques provides an alternative to in-stream monitoring techniques, which are often costly, staff-intensive, and cannot be deployed during large floods. Seismic monitoring is a surrogate method requiring several steps to convert seismic data into bedload data. State-of-the-art approaches of conversion exploit physical models predicting the seismic signal generated by bedload transport. Here, we did an active seismic survey (2017-11) and used seismic data from a flood event (2016-02-22) on the Nahal Ehstemoa to constrain a seismic bedload model. We conducted the active seismic survey to determine the local seismic ground properties, i.e., the Green’s function. We also used water depth and bedload grain size distribution to constrain the seismic bedload model and were able to compare the bedload flux obtained from the seismic data using the model with high-quality independent bedload measurements from slot samplers on the site. The complementary non-seismic data is published in a separate data publication (Lagarde et al., 2020).