Long-term river meandering as a part of chaotic dynamics? A contribution from mathematical modelling

In the present contribution we focus our attention on the possible signatures of a chaotic behaviour or a self-organized criticality state triggered in river meandering dynamics by repeated occurrence of cutoff processes. The analysis is carried out examining, through some robust nonlinear methodologies inferred from time series analysis, both the spatial series of local curvatures and the time series of long-term channel sinuosity. Temporal distribution of cutoff inter-arrivals is also investigated. The analyzed data have been obtained by using a suitable physics-based simulation model for river meandering able to reproduce reasonably the features of real rivers. The results are consistent and show that, at least from a modelling point of view, no evidence of chaotic determinism or self-organized criticality is detectable in the investigated meandering dynamics. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.