Discover the Editor's Choice: From each issue of the leading journal Water Science & Technology the core team of editors select one outstanding paper to share across IWA Publishing platforms. 

IWA Publishing is pleased to announce that the 36th Editor's Choice Paper, chosen by Jeroen Langveld is now Open Access: 

Hysteresis analysis to quantify and qualify the sediment dynamics: state of the art

Simone Malutta, Masato Kobiyama, Pedro Luiz Borges Chaffe and Nadia Bernardi Bonumá

https://doi.org/10.2166/wst.2020.279

Why was this paper selected for Editor's Choice? 

Myth busting is one of the responsibilities of scientists. However, many research fields keep myths alive for decades as part of the general beliefs of the community. In the urban drainage field, one of these myths is the first flush phenomenon, assessing the distribution of discharged pollutant mass over the discharged volume. The general assumption is still that the first part of the runoff in any storm event shows the highest concentration, despite abundant evidence that the opposite may also be true. I selected the paper ‘Hysteresis analysis to quantify and qualify the sediment dynamics: state of the art’ as the authors did a great job in analysing a large amount of papers on a very similar topic in a related research field. Hysteresis analysis has been applied widely to analyse the relation between flow and sediment transport in rivers. Like for urban drainage systems, concentration peaks have been observed in the rising limb of the hydrograph (resulting in a clock-wise hysteresis, comparable to a first flush) as well as in the falling limb (resulting in a counter-clockwise hysteresis). It is interesting to note that the analysis of a very similar phenomenon, i.e. the relation between the hydrograph and pollutograph, has been dealt with differently in two related research fields. I wonder what would have happened if the first paper on first flush for sewers would have used hysteresis analysis instead…

Jeroen Langveld, Editor.