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Catchment drainage network scaling laws found experimentally in overland flow morphologies

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posted on 2018-10-19, 08:47 authored by Mohsen Cheraghi, Andrea Rinaldo, Graham SanderGraham Sander, Paolo Perona, D. Andrew Barry
The scaling relation between the drainage area and stream length (Hack's law), along with exceedance probabilities of drainage area, discharge, and upstream flow network length, is well known for channelized fluvial regions. We report here on a laboratory experiment on an eroding unconsolidated sediment for which no channeling occurred. Laser scanning was used to capture the morphological evolution of the sediment. High-intensity, spatially nonuniform rainfall ensured that the morphology changed substantially over the 16-hr experiment. Based on the surface scans and precipitation distribution, overland flow was estimated with the D8 algorithm, which outputs a flow network that was analyzed statistically. The above-mentioned scaling and exceedance probability relationships for this overland flow network are the same as those found for large-scale catchments and for laboratory experiments with observable channels. In addition, the scaling laws were temporally invariant, even though the network dynamically changed over the course of experiment.

Funding

Financial support was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation(200021-144320).

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Geophysical Research Letters

Volume

45

Issue

18

Pages

9614 - 9622

Citation

CHERAGHI, M. ... et al, 2018. Catchment drainage network scaling laws found experimentally in overland flow morphologies. Geophysical Research Letters, 45(18), pp. 9614-9622.

Publisher

American geophysical Union (AGU) © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-08-31

Publication date

2018-09-22

Notes

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

ISSN

0094-8276

eISSN

1944-8007

Language

  • en

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