Mathematical Geosciences

, Volume 44, Issue 5, pp 583–594 | Cite as

Scaling Behavior of Gravel Surfaces

  • Jie Qin
  • Deyu Zhong
  • Sai Leung Ng
  • Guangqian Wang
Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

Roughness of successively developed gravel surfaces in flume experiments is investigated using laser scanned elevation fields. Scaling behavior of these surfaces is studied using structure functions. The results show that all surfaces exhibit good scaling behavior for two scaling regions. Multifractal analysis based on singular measures is then conducted for the two scaling regions, respectively. The relatively smaller scaling region characterizing subgrain scale roughness exhibits evident nonstationarity and intermittency. In contrary, the measures for the larger scaling region characterizing the spatial distribution of grains are more stationary and less intermittent than the measures for the subgrain scaling region.

Keywords

Multifractal analysis Scaling invariance Armouring process Roughness 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. J. Aberle who kindly provided the DEMs and flow data of flume experiments. Financial support from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China through the 973 project under Grant 2011CB409901, the National Key Technologies R&D Program of China during the 12th Five-Year Plan Period (No. 2012BAB05B01), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51039004) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank the associate editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

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Copyright information

© International Association for Mathematical Geosciences 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jie Qin
    • 1
  • Deyu Zhong
    • 1
  • Sai Leung Ng
    • 2
  • Guangqian Wang
    • 1
  1. 1.State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and EngineeringTsinghua UniversityBeijingChina
  2. 2.Department of Geography and Resources ManagementThe Chinese University of Hong KongHong KongChina

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