Discharge Estimation in Compound River Channels

Increasing population growth has gradually resulted in increased human settlements, developments and activities around the floodplains of rivers which leads to significant devastations and disastrous effects during flooding of natural rivers. Therefore, it has become important to adequately estimate the discharge and conveyance capacity of rivers. The methods used for these predictions are mainly the one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional approaches. This work evaluates the application of one-dimensional Lateral Distribution Method (LDM) via the use of commonly available commercial software for the estimation of discharge/conveyance capacity of compound channels and compare the results to that of the traditional one-dimensional methods, Single Channel Method (SCM) and Divided Channel Method (DCM).