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The degree of meandering of the channel of a river, stream, or other watercourse is measured by its sinuosity. The sinuosity of a watercourse is the ratio of the length of the channel to the straight line down-valley distance. Streams or rivers with a single channel and sinuosities of 1.5 or more are defined as meandering streams or rivers. [1] [3]
It is expressed as the ratio of the distance between two distant points in a river following the middle-of-the-river course of the river as compared with the straight distance between those points. [4] Three conventional categorizations of rivers or their reaches exist. Meandering rivers have a sinuosity value/ratio of greater than 1.5.
1.50 ≤ SI: meandering; It has been claimed that river shapes are governed by a self-organizing system that causes their average sinuosity (measured in terms of the source-to-mouth distance, not channel length) to be π, [3] but this has not been borne out by later studies, which found an average value less than 2. [4]
River channel migration is the geomorphological process that involves the lateral migration of an alluvial river channel across its floodplain. This process is mainly driven by the combination of bank erosion of and point bar deposition over time. When referring to river channel migration, it is typically in reference to meandering streams.
"River", however, is a misnomer as the Colorado is dry or small stream most of the year, due to its flow being almost completely exhausted by upstream diversions. The river bed will occasionally contain water, though, due either to monsoon storms over the Gila River Basin, or more rarely due to a particularly heavy snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains.
Braided rivers, which form in (tectonically active) areas that have a larger sedimentary load than the discharge of the river and a high gradient. Meandering rivers, which form a sinuous path in a usually low-gradient plain toward the end of a fluvial system.
In meandering rivers, bifurcations are often unstable in their configuration, and usually result in channel avulsion. [1] The stability of bifurcation is dependent on the rate of flow of the river upstream as well as the sediment transport of the upper reaches of the branches just after bifurcation occurs. [2]
A wide variety of river and stream channel types exist in limnology, the study of inland waters.All these can be divided into two groups by using the water-flow gradient as either low gradient channels for streams or rivers with less than two percent (2%) flow gradient, or high gradient channels for those with greater than a 2% gradient.