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Two Indices to Measure the Intensity of Meander

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Landscape Ecology and Water Management

Part of the book series: Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences ((AGES))

Abstract

Waveform or meandering is obvious for all stream channels. Ideal waveforms, such as a sine or cosine wave, are one line thick, but for a stream, the width must be taken into consideration. The meandering stream follows the down-valley axis, a line fitted to the curve such that the sum of all the amplitudes measured from it is zero. However to determine the intensity of the meander of a stream, several measures such as Wavelength, Amplitude, Curvature, Radius Of Curvature, Sinuosity, Radius: Width Ratio, Wavelength/Width Ratio etc. have been used. The present paper is trying to introduce two other measures—Meander Form Index (FmI) and Meander Shape Index (SmI) to the field not only to give a quantitative value to the meander but also to add quality to it.

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Acknowledgement

Who with their kind of spontaneous help made me grateful to them to complete this study are my beloved students; boatmen of different ferry ghats and fishermen who live on the river Jalangi making the herculean task of channel measurement possible. I acknowledge my hearty gratitude to them whose names are not uttered here but some information and diagram of them has been collected from internet, the system with which I am not familiar adequately. Listed names under the sub-head ‘reference’ are also acknowledged. I also acknowledge my gratitude to my beloved student Aznarul Islam who is well acquainted with the Key Style of different journals and who set this paper in the structure. I must acknowledge my hearty gratitude to Prof. Mehtab Singh, Prof. R.B. Singh, Prof. Izhar Hassan, editors, who gave me privilege providing space for this paper in this volume. Last but not the least I express my gratitude to Springer.

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Correspondence to Balai Chandra Das .

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Das, B.C. (2014). Two Indices to Measure the Intensity of Meander. In: Singh, M., Singh, R., Hassan, M. (eds) Landscape Ecology and Water Management. Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54871-3_17

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