Slide 5 of 20
Notes:
Attempts to model in detail the flow and sediment transport in multiple branched channels would be challenging, even with modern computers. A simplified approach as recently been developed by Murray and Paola (Murray, A.B., and Paola, C., 1994, A cellular model of braided rivers, Nature, 371, 54-57). This model uses simple modeling of flow and sediment transport over an irregular bed, introducing instability by introducing lags between transport and local flow and some sediment transport possible against an adverse bed slope. This is an illustration of their model. (a) shows the flow through the simulated channel system, more flow in red and yellow locations, less in green, blue, and black. Note the dividing and recombining of the flow. (b) shows the corresponding bed topography, again high areas are yellow, low areas are blue, with reds and greens in between. An early stage of the bed topography is shown in (c). (Illustration from Howard, 1996, op. Cit.).
