Anisotropy Characteristics of Exposed Gravel Beds Revealed in High-Point-Density Airborne Laser Scanning Data

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the anisotropy direction of exposed gravel bed and flow direction. Previous studies have shown that the anisotropy direction of a gravel bed surface can be visually determined in the elliptical contours of 2-D variogram surface (2DVS). In this letter, airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds were acquired at a gravel bed, and the whole data set was divided into a series of 6 m × 6 m subsets. To estimate the direction of anisotropy, we proposed an ellipse-fitting-based automatic procedure with consideration given to the grain size characteristic d₅₀ to estimate the primary axis of anisotropy [hereafter referred to as the primary continuity direction (PCD)] in the 2DVS. The ALS-derived PCDs were compared to the flow directions (for both high and low flow) derived from hydrodynamic model simulation. Comparison of ALS-derived PCDs and simulated flow directions suggested that ALS-derived PCDs could be used to infer flow direction at different flow rates. Furthermore, we found that the ALS-derived PCDs estimated from any elliptical contour of the 2DVS exhibited a similar orientation when the contours of the 2DVS reveal the clear anisotropic structure, demonstrating the robustness of the technique.