Abstract
Earth-surface change and its associated hazards are particularly
pronounced in low-lying deltaic areas. Recent developments in the
understanding of deltaic change and its connections to climate and land
use call for models to assess these linkages on a global scale. At the
core of such models there must be a robust algorithm to determine the
location of river mouths. Here I will discuss efforts to use global
elevation, climate, and feature extraction models to find all river
deltas. Two major algorithmic challenges have been that data
uncertainties in global products are magnified in low relief areas, and
that traditional stream models are unable to handle distributary flow
networks. As expected, we also find that the number of river mouths
depends on data resolution. Nevertheless, we consistently find around
15.000 coastal river deltas in varying degrees of alluviation.
Original language | English |
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Pages | 14119 |
Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2017 |
Externally published | Yes |