Abstract
Abstract. The eSCAPE model is a Python-based landscape evolution model that simulates over geological time (1) the dynamics of the landscape, (2) the transport of sediment from source to sink, and (3) continental and marine sedimentary basin formation under different climatic and tectonic conditions. The eSCAPE model is open-source, cross-platform, distributed under the GPLv3 licence, and available on GitHub (http://escape.readthedocs.io, last access: 23 September 2019). Simulated processes rely on a simplified mathematical representation of landscape processes – the stream power and creep laws – to compute Earth's surface evolution by rivers and hillslope transport. The main difference with previous models is in the underlying numerical formulation of the mathematical equations. The approach is based on a series of implicit iterative algorithms defined in matrix form to calculate both drainage area from multiple flow directions and erosion–deposition processes. The eSCAPE model relies on the PETSc parallel library to solve these matrix systems. Along with the description of the algorithms, examples are provided to illustrate the model current capabilities and limitations. It is the first landscape evolution model able to simulate processes at the global scale and is primarily designed to address problems on large unstructured grids (several million nodes).
Highlights
Since the 1990s, many software programmes have been designed to estimate long-term catchment dynamics, drainage evolution, and sedimentary basin formation in response to various mechanisms such as tectonic or climatic forcing (Braun and Sambridge, 1997; Coulthard et al, 2002; Davy and Lague, 2009; Simoes et al, 2010; Salles, 2016; Grieve et al, 2016b; Hobley et al, 2017)
The eSCAPE model computes the flow discharge (m3 yr−1) from Flow accumulation (FA) and the net precipitation rate P using the parallel implicit drainage area (IDA) method proposed by Richardson et al (2014) but adapted to unstructured grids (Fig. 1)
The climate and tectonic keywords (Table 2) may be defined as a sequence of multiple forcing conditions each requiring a starting time and either a constant value applied to the entire grid or spatially varying values specified in a file
Summary
Since the 1990s, many software programmes have been designed to estimate long-term catchment dynamics, drainage evolution, and sedimentary basin formation in response to various mechanisms such as tectonic or climatic forcing (Braun and Sambridge, 1997; Coulthard et al, 2002; Davy and Lague, 2009; Simoes et al, 2010; Salles, 2016; Grieve et al, 2016b; Hobley et al, 2017) These models rely on a set of mathematical and physical expressions that simulate sediment erosion, transport, and deposition and can reproduce the 1st-order complexity of Earth’s surface geomorphological evolution (Tucker and Hancock, 2010; Shobe et al, 2017).
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