NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF LANDSCAPE EVOLUTION WITH A COMPARISON TO NATURAL FORMATIONS

We propose a new model of landscape evolution based on a priori physical laws rather than a posteriori observations. In this presentation, we show results obtained from running code published on the Image Processing On Line (IPOL) server, publically available on the internet.

We show numerical results obtained by our proposed model on various initial landscapes and for various parameters. These examples illustrate some common geomorphological features produced by nature and observed in the literature of landscape formation. These features include the inception of river networks, convex upslope-concave downslope appearance of hills, the regular spacing of river networks, the sedimentation front at the flowing of rivers into a lake or ocean, fractal river branching, and basin expansion.

The numerical results obtained suggest that changing various parameters in the model can alter the morphology of the landscape and the various features observed, even for the same initial landscape. The model presented also shows promise in the field of channel network restoration, as river networks tend to become clearer with the proper choice of parameters in the erosion model.

Digital elevation model (DEM) examples are also presented. Two problems with DEM collection are the introduction of small spurious pits and that single pixels or small patches can often erroneously block rivers. We show numerical examples illustrating that our landscape evolution model has potential in dealing with both problems.