Conférence

M Carles Ferre-Boix, professeur au département de géographie de l'University of British Columbia, prononcera une conférence le 16 août 2016 à 15 h 00, à la salle 2422 du Centre Eau Terre Environnement de l'INRS.

La conférence du professeur Ferre-Boix s'intitule Controls on sediment dynamics and river morphology.

Despite the time elapsed since the first developments on the movement of sediment particles back in the late XIX century, direct field and laboratory measurements of sediment transport in rivers are many times more than an order of magnitude different than our predictions. These theoretical predictions, mostly based on mean flow variables, do not incorporate the actual nature dynamics of bed surface arrangements (e.g. armouring, presence of bed structures and clusters). This, alongside with the usual steady flow conditions used to derive sediment transport functional relations and the relatively little attention to the role played by the sediment availability in sediment transport, potentially limiting the amount of sediment that can actually be transported, have been claimed to contribute to the discrepancies between measured rates and theoretical predictions. Besides sediment supply, flow regime (magnitude and frequency of flow events) and streamwise channel width variations are also important controls on sediment transport dynamics and river morphology whose impacts on river response are not fully understood. These topics will be the focus of the lecture and our approach to tackle them is based on combining field observations, laboratory flume experiments and numerical and mathematical models.

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