Quantifying river form variations in the Mississippi Basin using remotely sensed imagery

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Miller, Zachary Fritz
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geological Sciences

Abstract

Geographic variations in river shape are often estimated using the framework of downstream hydraulic geometry (DHG), which links spatial changes in discharge and channel width, depth, and velocity through power-law models. Because these empirical relationships are derived from in situ data and may not describe all variability in channel form, we create a dataset of 1.2x10^6 river widths in the Mississippi Basin measured from remotely sensed imagery. We construct DHG for the Mississippi drainage by linking DEM-estimated discharge values to each width measurement. Well-developed DHG exists over the entire Mississippi basin, while individual sub-basins vary substantially from existing width-discharge scaling. Comparison of depth predictions from traditional depth-discharge relationships with one incorporating width into the DHG framework shows that including width improves depth estimates in basins with high width variability. Results suggest that channel geometry derived from remotely sensed imagery better characterizes variability in river form than the assumptions of DHG.

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