Characterizing River Width Across Spatial Scales in the Mississippi River Basin

Abstract

Rivers host complex exchanges between the water and atmosphere at their flowing surface. Constraining estimates of global river and surface area is important to account for greenhouse gas evasion from the fluvial network. Wetted river width, or the portion of a channel containing water, is used to calculate river surface area, which varies temporally and spatially throughout river networks. Past efforts characterize the width of rivers at large spatial scales using width measurements from remote sensing and are informed by field surveys of the narrowest rivers, often obtained from other studies. This study utilizes both fieldwork and remote sensing to measure the widths of rivers in three different sized watersheds within the Mississippi River basin, then characterizes the distribution of observed river widths at each spatial scale.