Research project

Meandering rivers due to its bend migration engulf agricultural land, homestead and can pose threat to important installations like bridges, railway lines, industries etc. Therefore, it should be a major concern and consideration to planners and practising engineers. If prediction is possible regarding the bend migration at some time scale for a meandering river planners and practising engineers could use it in their planning and design of future structures and also take safe guarding measure for the installations which already exist from danger. This research project is intended to achieve such goal in predicting future bend migration. This project uses the data base of National Cooperative Highway Research Program, which is administered by the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council of USA. In the data base the rivers were classified according to Brice classification and data were collected on 89 rivers around 1500 meander bends across 24 states. This study focuses on the finding migration at bend apex at a particular ratio of radius of curvature of bend to river width. Hence, the prediction will use few simple and easily available bend-related parameters (whereas as we all know the river course shipment involves many – nearly infinite- natural variables) and thus this might have easy application to both practising professionals and ordinary people related to this natural hazard.

Prediction of Rivers at a Variety of Scales