Relative role of bed roughness change and bed erosion on peak discharge increase in hyperconcentrated floods

River floods are usually featured by a downstream flattening discharge peak whereas a downstream increasing discharge peak is observed at a rate exceeding the tributary discharge during highly silt-laden floods (hyperconcentrated floods) in China’s Yellow River. It entails a great challenge in the downstream flood defence and the underlying...

Morphological modeling using a fully coupled, total variation diminishing upwind-biased centered scheme

High-resolution morphological modeling of fluvial processes with complex, rapidly varying flows has been limited so far by model accuracy or computational efficiency. One of the most widely used numerical algorithms is based on the total variation diminishing method, solved by either upwind or centered approaches. An upwind scheme preserves high...

Eco-morphological problems in the Yangtze estuary and the Western Scheldt

This paper compares the Yangtze Estuary in China and the Western Scheldt Estuary in The Netherlands by their morphodynamic and ecological systems, their engineering works and estuarine management issues, and the major challenges in studying them. Physically speaking, the two estuaries are very different. The Yangtze Estuary is much larger and...

Modeling of channel patterns in short tidal basins

We model branching channel patterns in short tidal basins with two methods. A theoretical stability analysis leads to a relationship between the number of channels and physical parameters of the tidal system. The analysis reveals that width and spacing of the channels should decrease as the slope of the bottom profile and the Shields parameter...