Fieldwork will be performed at strategic sites on the South Saskatchewan River, Canada to provide data for model development and evaluation.
This river is well suited to the requirements of this research because:
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.
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.