LBRARIES THE ANALYSIS OF RIVER BASINS AND CHANNEL NETWORKS USING DIGITAL TERRAIN DATA

This work examines patterns of regularity and scale in landform and channel networks. Digital elevation model data sets from throughout the United States are used as a data source. First we consider the two-dimensional planform properties of channel networks. We find that networks as a whole may be regarded as space filling fractals, ie.., with fractal dimension 2. The scaling may be described by Horton's laws and provides a link between Horton length and bifurcation ratios. Second we focus on elevation where the mean slope of rivers is characterized by a power law scaling with area. Investigations have recently used this to suggest that channel slopes are self-similar with magnitude or area as a scaling index. Our data indicates otherwise; in particular the variance of channel slope is larger than that predicted by simple self-similarity. The coefficient of variation of link slopes increases with area contributing to the link. This suggests multi-scaling. The scaling exponent for the standard deviation is approximately half the correspondin