Project Field Area

Fieldwork will be performed at strategic sites on the South Saskatchewan River, Canada to provide data for model development and evaluation.

Map showing the location of the study reach on the South Saskatchewan River near the town of Outlook, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Location of the study reach on the South Saskatchewan River near the town of Outlook in Saskatchewan, Canada.

This river is well suited to the requirements of this research because:

  • It is characterized by mobile bars and dunes, and active bedload and suspended sediment transport (D50~0.3 mm);
  • Conditions are ideal for applying photogrammetric techniques to derive high resolution DEMs from remote imagery, as demonstrated by previous work on the river;
  • The availability of aerial photography, commissioned by members of the research team and collected to photogrammetric standards (covering the period 2000-2011), provides an unrivalled resource for quantifying sand-bed river morphodynamics over six monthly to decadal timescales. These timescales are ideal for quantifying the large-scale evolution of compound bars (X) and bar complexes (Y).

We will undertake fieldwork to link these large-scale aspects of channel morphodynamics to phenomena operating over smaller time and space scales; specifically, the evolution of unit bars (z) over timescales of weeks to months, and the migration and evolution of dunes over days.

Examples of the South Saskatchewan River channel morphology and typical CFD modelling region.
Examples of the South Saskatchewan River channel morphology and typical CFD modelling region.
Large-scale channel morphology of the South Saskatchean River and an example CFD modelling region.
Large-scale channel morphology of the South Saskatchean River and an example CFD modelling region.

Data collection will focus on a 4 km study reach southwest of the town of Outlook. We will study a 4 km reach because this scale is appropriate for quantifying bar-scale morphodynamics over a two year period. We will derive high resolution DEMs quantifying channel morphology within this reach on multiple occasions in each of years 1 and 2 of the project.