Characterizing the river migration process based on migration events of individual bends: a case study of the lower Yellow River, China

Abstract

Frequent channel shifts in the Lower Yellow River easily leads to embankment collapse causing geomorphological processes necessary to characterize. This paper segmented the river centreline from its component unit-bends and established a migration event model to characterize the migration process of rivers. The inflection points on the river centreline can be used to segment individual bends. Three types of migration events, disappearance, lateral migration and decomposition, are defined for the first time to categorize river migration. Furthermore, these migration events can be rapidly detected using the Meander Migration Index. The four-tuple BMModel (Bend Migration Model), including events, spatial positions, bend types and migration attributes, systematically quantifies the river migration process. In addition, these results can be implemented with an integrated PyBend (Python-Bend migarition) package, providing promising technical support for the studies of river migration and evolution over long time series.