Winooski River Drainage Basin

The calculated estimate of rainfall over the Winooski river basin is 3.4319535 km^3 yr^-1, however, the monthly adjusted mean discharge of the Winooski at Essex Junction is 1818.2 cfs ~ 1.623655 km^3 yr^-1, meaning only 47.31% of the rainfall actually flows out through the river. As per the Land Use project, we know that well-draining soils only result in 30% runoff mostly due to plant evapotranspiration. It is likely that the interstate highway, cities, and farms account for the extra 17.31%.

Using this terrible data (n=5, n=8) for Total Dissolved Solids and Suspended Solids in the Winookski River at Essex Junction we can estimate erosion in the basin. These calculated volumes are 47.76 Tons km^-2 yr^-1 and 48.20 Tons km^-2 yr^-1 for suspended load and dissolved load respectively. Discounting the bedload of the river, this would account for a total of 95.96 Tons km^-2 yr^-1 of erosion in the Winooski Basin.

Although this certain sounds like a large amount, one can calculate the tons-Liters equivalent for a variety of solids, which in turn can be converted to cubic km for ratio comparison with the annual discharge. Following the procedure for the suspended load yields a ratio of 0.18 when adjusted for area. Which seems quite large, though as means, this may account for mostly clear water until snowmelt season when the most erosion occurs. Regardless, these concentrations of TDS and Suspended loads in a passive tectonic regime are relatively small. We can compare them to active tectonic regions like a study from Cuba which found dissolved loads ~2.5-16.25 times higher than that experienced in the Winooski Basin.