Dynamic characterization of meandering channels planform

Abstract

Meandering channels develop different geometry patterns along the floodplain during its evolution. These natural processes lead to developing lateral and longitudinal migration, describing a sort of swept that affect the human activities. As the equilibrium geometry of natural channels depends on: the flow and sediment discharge, geological conditions of valley, soil properties, and vegetation among others, the preliminary characterization is not easy. Due to this, several engineering and scientific problems require an appropriate description of morphological processes. The dynamic characterization like the quantification of wavelength, amplitude, sinuosity, and curvature using Medium Temporal Scheme (MTS) is using widely. Unlike the traditional scheme that only uses short or long-term schemes, MTS includes relevant morphological events (e.g., cutoff). In addition this, the satellite images has increased and achieves a high spatial resolution, even more when studying large basins. This paper presents and validates a MATLAB®-based toolbox called Meander Statistics Toolbox (MStaT) to perform the dynamic characterization of several meandering channels using the MTS. To run MStaT only need the centerline (CL), and the average width of channel as input parameters. To maximize the toolbox, MStaT incorporates the Wavelet Analysis (WA) to decompose the signal (CL) and obtains the power spectrum. Finally, two studies cases (synthetic and natural channels) will be presented to validate MStaT.