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From CSDMS
CSDMS 2025: Exploring Earth's Surface with Models, Data & AI
Simulating alluvial river evolution from geological to human time scales
Abstract
Alluvial rivers transform themselves as the environment changes. Excess sediment input may fill their beds and cause them to steepen. Additional water discharge can cause rivers to incise, widen, and/or reduce their slopes. When rivers flood above their banks, they deposit sediments across their floodplains. Such geomorphic changes produce stabilizing feedbacks: Floodplain deposition heightens the channel banks, decreasing the probability of a follow-up overbank flood. Likewise, channels widen in response to increasing streamflow or narrow through lateral deposition as streamflow wanes. To simulate how these interactions drive river-system change, we build theoretical and numerical approaches to solving coupled river-system dynamics while simultaneously assembling historical and geological data sets for model validation and improvement. The resultant tools can help to teach us the stories that past landscapes are sharing, and to forecast the impacts of intentional and incidental human impacts on rivers into the future.
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