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.

The Nahal (river) Eshtemoa is a gravel-bed river draining 119 km² of the Southern Hebron Mountains and the Northern Negev, northeast of Beer Sheva, Israel. The climate in the catchment is semi-arid, with a mean annual precipitation of 286 mm. Rainfall mainly occurs between October and May. The river is ephemeral with flash floods occurring on average five times per year (Alexandrov et al., 2009). The recurrence interval of the bankful discharge of 26 m3 s-1 has been estimated to be 1.25 years (Powell et al., 2012). Bedload fluxes are high by worldwide standards with sediment transport as much as 400 times more efficient than in a typical perennial humid river (Laronne and Reid, 1993; Reid and Laronne, 1995).

The river is equipped with a monitoring station in a straight channel section with a trapezoidal cross section. The banks are nearly vertical, 1.2 m high, and comprise aeolian fines and interbedded gravel. The mean channel slope is 0.0075, which is generally mirrored by the water surface slope, with exception during the arrival of a flashflood bore (Meirovich et al., 1998).

The data presented here are for the flood of the 22nd February 2016.They show a high bedload flux with peaks exceeding 1 kg/sm and water level between 0.5 and 0.8 m. The event has been previously described by Dietze et al. (2019).

The data were used to assess the quality of a physical model (Tsai et al. 2012) predicting the seismic spectrum generated by the impact of bedload particles moving along the channel bed. The model requires knowledge on stream and sediment characteristics to constrain the source terms, e.g., the channel geometry and grain size distribution, as well as ground properties affecting the wave propagation, i.e., frequency-dependent wave velocity or attenuation characteristics. The complementary controlled source and passive seismological data are published in a separate data publication (Lagarde et al., 2020).