Modeling of water flow in multi-channel river system in the Narew National Park

Abstract

Modeling of water flow in multi-channel river system in the Narew National Park . Anastomosing rivers constitute a rare example of multi-channel systems, which used to be very common before the agricultural and industrial development. Presently few of them remain worldwide and the only example in Poland is the Upper River Narew within Narew National Park. Although hydraulic modeling using one-dimensional models is commonly used to describe water flow in rivers, for multi-channel rivers problem is more complicated. For this type of rivers it is expected that the feedback between process of plants growth (expressed by Manning’s coefficient) and distribution of flow in anabranches is high. However, assignment procedure on roughness coefficients in splitting and rejoining channels is laborious and difficult. Therefore, for efficient water flow modeling in multi-channel systems a stand-alone hydraulic model equipped with automatic optimization procedure was developed. Optimization and validation stages, based on field measurements data of discharge and water levels, indicated that the model accurately simulates water flow in multi-channel system.