Remote sensing of stream flow rates - Correlation of meander and discharge spectra

Results of a study of river meander patterns and discharges, in which attempt was made to correlate the discharge spectrum of a river with the river meander power spectrum determined from aerial and satellite imagery. Some significant characteristics of both the discharge and the meander spectra have been discovered. Discharge frequency spectra based on long-term records of daily streamflow are found to have an inverse power-law dependence on discharge. This is shown to reflect the short-term decay of individual floods which are found to have an inverse power-law dependence on time. Meander power spectra for a number of river reaches, digitized from aerial photography, also show significant structure, the power spectral density having an inverse power-law dependence on wave number over one or more portions of the spectrum with breaks in the spectra at characteristic wave numbers. A number of examples of typical discharge and meander spectra are shown.