A Method for Riverway Erosion and Deposition Calculation Using Measured Cross-Sections

Abstract

The calculation of erosion and deposition in riverways plays a pivotal role in river morphology studies, comprehensive river management and flood safety. Some existing methods have certain limitations in terms of accuracy and applicability. To address these challenges, we propose a method for calculating riverway erosion and deposition based on measured cross-sectional terrain data. This method not only enables the calculation of changes in erosion and deposition along the riverway but also provides information on the spatial distribution of these changes. The validity of the proposed calculation method was assessed using measured bathymetric data. The results indicate a relative error of only 5.6% between the calculated and measured values for the total volume of erosion and deposition. A comparison with the results obtained using a cross-section method reveals that, with an average distance between adjacent sections of 1.0 km, the proposed method generally outperforms the cross-section method. The relative error in the total volume of erosion and deposition decreases from 19.2% with the cross-sectional method to 5.6% with our proposed method. When facing the need to calculate changes in riverway erosion and deposition, our approach offers a more accurate and flexible computational method.