Morphodynamic regime and long‐term evolution of meandering rivers

Abstract

In the present contribution we focus our attention on the long‐term behavior of meandering rivers, a very common pattern in nature. This class of dynamical systems is driven by the coexistence of various intrinsically nonlinear mechanisms which determine the possible occurrence of two different morphodynamic regimes: the subresonant and the superresonant regimes. Investigating the full range of morphodynamic conditions, we objectively compare the morphologic characteristics exhibited by synthetically generated and observed planimetric patterns. The analysis is carried out examining, through principal component analysis, a suitable set of morphological variables. We show that even in the presence of the strong filtering action exerted by cutoff processes, a closer, although not yet complete, similarity with natural meandering planforms can be achieved only by adopting a flow field model which accounts for the full range of morphodynamic regimes. We also introduce a new morphodynamic length scale, m , associated with spatially oscillating disturbances. Once normalized with this length scale, the relevant morphologic features of the simulated long‐term patterns (e.g., the probability density function of local curvature and the geometric characteristics of oxbow lakes) tend to collapse on two distinct behaviors, depending on the dominant morphologic regime.