Golestan Province is one of the most vulnerable areas to catastrophic flood events in Iran. The flood severity in this region has grown dramatically during the last decades, demanding a major investigation. Accordingly, an authentic map providing detailed information on floods is required to reduce future flood disasters. Three ensemble models produced by the combination of Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) and Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP) with Frequency Ratio (FR), and Weights of Evidence (WOE) are used to quantify the map flood susceptibility in Golestan Province, in the north of Iran. Ten flood effective criteria, namely altitude, slope degree, slope aspect, plan curvature, distance from rivers, Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), rainfall, soil type, geology, and land use, are considered for the modeling process. The flood zonation maps are validated by the receiver operating curve (ROC). The results show that the most precise model is MLP-FR (AUROC = 0.912), followed by EDAS-FR-AHP (AUROC = 0.875), and EDAS-WOE-AHP (AUROC = 0.845). The high accuracies of all methods applied to illustrate their capability in predicting flood susceptibility in future studies.

Changes in the width of channels or rivers that have three-dimensional pool-riffle can affect the key parameters of river engineering and flow resistance. Understanding the effect of width changes on flow structures helps to control erosion and sedimentation in coarse-bed rivers and better design ecological restoration projects. The present study investigates the effect of the sequential pool-riffle and its interaction with the bank narrowness on the turbulent flow characteristics. For this purpose, an experimental study was conducted in variable and fixed width flume with an aspect ratio greater than five. The results showed that when the flow decelerates (entrance of the pool), the negative and low longitudinal velocities expand as the flow depth increases. From both sides of the central axis, longitudinal velocities decreased when entering the middle part of the pool and reduced the flow width. The changes in the maximum turbulence intensity values, from the central axis towards the channel bank, in the variable and fixed width modes had an increasing trend. In all three longitudinal directions along the flume, the maximum turbulence intensity and the maximum Reynolds shear stress in the variable width mode were larger than those in fixed one. Knowledge of the flow pattern along a variable width stream and better understanding of velocity and Reynolds stress distribution will help engineers to better estimate the controlling parameters in river restoration and improve hydraulic models’ performance.

This experimental study aims to investigate the characteristics of turbulent flow in channels with vegetated banks and varying channel width under the condition of the incipient motion of bed material. The natural reeds were used as emergent vegetation on the sidewalls of a laboratory flume. In total, nine experimental runs have been conducted with different experimental setups by using three different particle sizes of bed material and three different channel bed slopes. An Acoustic Doppler velocimetry (ADV) was used to acquire velocity components in three directions. The results of this study indicate that the streamwise velocities have the maximum and minimum values at the cross sections with the narrowest and widest width, respectively. When the aspect ratio is less than 5, the maximum velocity occurs below the water surface, due to presence of the secondary currents. It is found that, at all measurement points, the distribution of the Reynolds shear stress has a Z-shaped profile owing to presence of vegetation on the channel sidewalls. By extrapolating the profiles for flow velocity and Reynolds shear stress towards the surface of the channel bed, the near-bed incipient velocities and the corresponding shear stresses for the incipient motion have been determined. By increasing the channel bed slope, the estimated near-bed parameters for all particle sizes decreased, indicating the dominance of the gravity effect over the pressure gradient effect. It was also observed that the Shields method was invalid for assessing the incipient motion of bed material in the presence of vegetation on the sidewalls of a channel that has a varying width.