Meandering evolution and width variation, a physics-statistical based modeling approach

Many models have been proposed to simulate and understand the long-term evolution of meandering rivers. These models analyze the hydraulics of the in-channel flow and the river bank movement (erosion – accretion) process in different ways, but some gap still remain, e.g. the stability of long-term simulations when width variations are accounted for. Here we proposed a physics-statistical based approach to simulate the river bank evolution, that erosion and deposition processes act independently, with a specific shear stress threshold for each of them. In addition, we link the width evolution with a parametric probability distribution (PPD) based on a mean characteristic channel width. We are thus able to obtaining stable long-term simulations with realistic and reasonable spatio-temporal distribution of the along channel width.