ENVIRONMENTAL DIFFERENCES IN MORPHOMETRIC PARAMETERS OF ALLUVIAL STREAMS

Previous work on alluvial meander geometry has suggested that the meander geometry is governed primarily by fluid mechanics regardless of the channel materials or sediment load. One of the more robust relations determined was that the ratio of radius of curvature to channel with is 2-3. Rather than amalgamate all rivers together, we compare the meander geometry of rivers from distinctly different environments (e.g. arid, bedrock, periglacial, temperate, and tropical). Satellite imagery freely available through available ESRI™ and GoogleEarth™ provided base maps from which we measured valley length, channel length, radii of curvature, meander wavelengths, and bankfull width using standard tools within ArcGIS. We generated plots of radius of curvature vs. meander wavelength and bank width vs. meander wavelength for our dataset and for each specific environment. Our results indicate statistically significant differences in these morphometric parameters between our data set and that of previous work. We see also significant differences between stream environments when compared against the combined dataset, suggesting that channel materials and debris load may have a discernable influence on channel form after all.