Shapes of river networks
Name
yi18unpublished.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
3.77 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e353d26efe7b72920b21d6a1572d6dd8
Author(s)
Yi, Robert Sngho
Arredondo, Álvaro
Stansifer, Eric Marshall
Rothman, Daniel H.
Date Issued
July 2018
Journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Publisher
The Royal Society
Citation
Yi, Robert S. et al. “Shapes of river networks.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 474, 2215 (July 2018): 20180081 © 2018 The Author(s)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
River network scaling laws describe how their shape varies with their size. However, the regional variation of this size-dependence remains poorly understood. Here we show that river network scaling laws vary systematically with the climatic aridity index. We find that arid basins do not change their proportions with size, while humid basins do. To explore why, we study an aspect ratio L /L ∥ between basin width L and basin length L ∥. We find that the aspect ratio exhibits a dependence on climate and argue that this can be understood as a structural consequence of the confluence angle. We then find that, in humid basins, the aspect ratio decreases with basin size, which we attribute to a common hydrogeological hierarchy. Our results offer an explanation of the variability in network scaling exponents and suggest that the absence of self-similarity in humid basins can be understood as a morphological expression of subsurface processes.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1098/RSPA.2018.0081
