Predicting downstream hydraulic geometry: A test of rational regime theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The classical equations of hydraulic geometry are purely empirical, but the widespread similarity of the scaling (downstream) form of them suggests that they express some important underlying regularities in the morphology of stream channels through the drainage network. A successful physical theory of river regime must be able to reproduce and explain this regularity. In this paper we test the regime theory of Eaton et al. (2004) using selected data of hydraulic geometry. We first use data from environments in which bank strength presumably does not vary greatly, such as in anabranched channel systems and deltas. Regime models parameterized by assuming uniform relative bank strength plausibly describe the observed bankfull channel geometries in these systems. We then test a modified bank strength formulation for vegetated gravel bed rivers against downstream hydraulic geometry data sets in which relative bank strength is supposed to vary with channel scale. Assuming a uniform effective cohesion due to riparian vegetation, the regime model is again able to reproduce details of the channel geometry. Both analyses show that the classical hydraulic geometry represents only an approximation of the variation of channel form. If we have confidence in the theory, we may infer information about bank strength and bed material transport. The pattern of variation in these quantities, as well as discharge, through the drainage system lends approximate regularity to stream channel scaling that is summarized in the empirical relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".