Quantifying Galloway: Fluvial, Tidal and Wave Influence on Experimental and Field Deltas

Abstract

Deltas are some of the most densely settled landscapes on Earth and are of the utmost importance economic and agricultural importance. Human use of these areas is threatened by climate change, and our future management of them will benefit from increased understanding of their response to the energy regimes that shape their planform morphology. We present a series of experiments on experimental deltas in which we study the link between impinging tide and wave energy and measures of delta geometry as well as an application of these metrics to a large dataset of images of deltas in the field.