N. (2014) 'Quantiable eectiveness of experimental scaling of river-and delta morphodynamics and stratigraphy.', Earth-science reviews., 133 . pp. 43-61. Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2014.03.001Publisher's copyright statement: NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Earth-Science Reviews. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A denitive version was subsequently published in Earth-Science Reviews, 133, June 2014, 10.1016/j.earscirev.2014.03.001.
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AbstractLaboratory experiments to simulate landscapes and stratigraphy often suffer from scale effects, because reducing lengthand time scales leads to different behaviour of water and sediment. Classically, scaling proceeded from dimensional analysis of the equations of motion and sediment transport, and minor concessions, such as vertical length scale distortion, led to acceptable results. In the past decade many experiments were done that seriously violated these scaling rules, but nevertheless produced significant and insightful results that resemble the real world in quantifiable ways.Here we focus on self-formed fluvial channels and channel patterns in experiments. The objectives of this paper are 1) to identify what aspects of scaling considerations are most important for experiments that simulate morphodynamics and stratigraphy of rivers and deltas, 2) to establish a design strategy for experiments based on a combination of relaxed classical scale rules, theory of bars and meanders, and small-scale experiments focussed at specific processes. We present a number of small laboratory setups and protocols that we use to rapidly quantify erosive and sedimentary types of forms and dynamics that develop in the landscape experiments as a function of detailed properties such as effective material strength and to assess potential scale effects. Most importantly, the width-to-depth ratio of channels determines the bar pattern and meandering tendency. The strength of floodplain material determines these channel dimensions, and theory predicts that laboratory rivers should have 1.5 times larger width-to-depth ratios for the same bar pattern. We show how floodplain formation can be controlled by a...