Characterization of influence zones of simulated droughts and floods of water bodies in a floodplain

Abstract

During flooding processes, randomly situated water bodies of varying sizes and shapes in a floodplain tend to self-organize. At high degrees of flooding intensity, water bodies contact together to form influence zones, which indicate the self-organized criticality of the flooding of water bodies. The characterization of water bodies and their influence zones provides useful insight into the geomorphic properties of floodplain terrains. In this paper, characterization of the influence zones of simulated droughts and floods of water bodies in a floodplain is performed. First, drought and flood simulations are implemented by performing morphological erosion and dilation, respectively, on water bodies using square kernels of increasing sizes. The level of droughting/flooding is indicated by the kernel size. The average areas of the influence zones of the generated simulated droughts and floods of water bodies are computed. It is observed that as the droughting level increases from 1 to 5, the average area of the influence zones of water bodies reduces due to the shrinking of water bodies. As the droughting level increases from 5 to 15, the average area of the influence zones of water bodies increases due the vanishing of small water bodies. Flooding causes an increase in the average area of the influence zones of water bodies due to the merging of adjacent water bodies. A power law relationship is observed between the average area of the influence zones of the simulated droughts/floods and the level of droughting/flooding. The scaling exponent of this power law, which is named as a fractal dimension, indicates the rate of change of average area of the influence zones of simulated droughts/floods of water bodies in a floodplain over varying levels of droughting/flooding.