Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is used to examine the release of highly concentrated water–sediment mixture in water, with or without ambient current. This technique allows us to extract the dominant features in spatio-temporal data sets and the POD total energies associated to the base parameter of the decomposition. Both one-component and two-component POD techniques are, respectively, applied on data relative to the solid volume fraction and on the solid volume fraction velocities. The analysis is based on an experiment in the literature and data sets provided by a two-phase flow solid-fluid numerical simulation. For release phenomenon without ambient current, the analysis of the POD results highlights that the impact of the particle diameter on the solid phase dynamics and the particle dispersion is modest during the falling time, but that it becomes preponderant during the formation of a turbidity current. Aided by POD, the impact of the ambient current is studied for a given particle diameter. As the ambient current becomes strong, we can observe the effect of the resistance of the bottom against the water–sediment mixture transport. According to the strength of the ambient current, the POD results show that the dynamics of the release phenomenon have two different regimes on either side of a clearly identified threshold value .