Generate Synthetic Riverbed Topography for Meandering Rivers

Meandering rivers erode their outer banks and deposit sediments on their inner banks. This process makes point bars, which are always exposed when water level is relatively low and thus visible in satellite/aerial imageries. It is interesting and educational to apply this tool to manufacture your own meandering river at any scales, or to investigate meandering rivers near you.

This tool could:

• help people working on hydrodynamic and morphodynamic modeling of fluvial processes with preparing their FEM triangle meshes and boundary condition files

• help people working on field surveying with interpolating bathymetry data in unexplored zones during their campaigns

• help people working on laboratory experiments with designing their flumes

• Provides two modes:

  • Making synthetic meandering rivers via the built-in Kinoshita Curve calculator
  • Reading users' own real river centerlines

• Expands 1D centerline to 2D river channel by polyline offsetting

• Calculates riverbed topography through an analytical method

• Simulates meander channel migration using linear channel migration model

• Makes finite element mesh files and boundary condition files for TELEMAC numerical modeling

• Cross-platform, runs on macOS, Linux, Windows machines

• Uses a tkinter-based graphical user interface (GUI) as front end

• Python >= 3.5
• tkinter (in most cases it comes with Python installation)
• Numpy
• Scipy
• Matplotlib
• Numba
• tabulate
• imageio (only needed if simulating meander channel migration)

Using Anaconda and using conda to create a virtual environment are recommended:

conda create -n pyriverbed python numpy scipy matplotlib numba tabulate imageio
conda activate pyriverbed

OR, if pip is more preferred, just install Numpy, Scipy, Matplotlib, Numba, tabulate and imageio by:

pip3 install numpy scipy matplotlib numba tabulate imageio

In some versions of Ubuntu in Windows Subsystem for Linux, tkinter may not be installed with Python3, then installation of tkinter by sudo apt install python3-tk in Ubuntu or a similar command in other platforms is required.

The following two are recommended, but not required:

• PyInstaller (to freeze python codes and dependencies into a single package, i.e., making executables);
• Gifsicle (a command-line tool to optimize GIFs) and its Python wrapper pygifsicle.

Example:

from pygifsicle import optimize
optimize("path_to_my_gif.gif")

git clone https://github.com/ZhiLiHydro/pyRiverBed.git

python3 gui4pyriverbed.py first, then enter model parameters, and click Generate steering file button to prepare the steering file steering.txt

GUI method: click Run pyRiverBed button in GUI to run pyRiverBed

CLI method: quit the GUI and then type python3 pyriverbed.py in command line to run pyRiverBed

Both methods to run pyRiverBed work with zero differences

Task: Reproduce the flume studied in this paper.

The default parameters in GUI are pre-typed for this case, so nothing needs to be changed. Click Generate steering file button, then click Run pyRiverBed button to run and check the results.

Synthetic riverbed	River centerline

Task: Read centerline coordinates from file.

The river centerline of a randomly picked reach (at 7°32'09.9"S 72°31'16.0"W) of a randomly picked river (it's Juruá River in Brazil) is discretized manually (well, a fancy centerline extraction tool is recommended here for real cases) on a georeferenced TIFF map. The river centerline coordinates is saved to jurua.txt. Open the GUI to type in the followings: mode = 2, file name = 'jurua.txt', width = 160 m (estimated), depth = 8 m (arbitrary), slope = 0 (arbitrary), lag strength = 6 (estimated), flip in transverse direction = no. Keep the defaults for other parameters. Click Generate steering file button, then click Run pyRiverBed button in GUI to run and see the results.

Synthetic riverbed	River centerline

Li, Z., & Garcia, M. H. (2021). pyRiverBed: A Python framework to generate synthetic riverbed topography for constant-width meandering rivers. Computers & Geosciences, 152. doi:10.1016/j.cageo.2021.104755

Rowley, T., Konsoer, K., Langendoen, E. J., Li, Z., Ursic, M., & Garcia, M. H. (2021). Relationship of point bar morphology to channel curvature and planform evolution. Geomorphology, 375. doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2020.107541

MIT License