Water surface profile computation for compound channel with vegetated floodplains

Water level determination during a flood is always a challenging task for river engineers. During the flood, river channel becomes compound consisting of the main river channel which carries low flows and floodplains that carry overbank flows.  Flow velocity and structures are affected by vegetation, the degree to which depends on vegetation density, flexibility, type, and whether it is in a submerged or emergent condition. Water surface modeling help for the study of flood waves, water level calculation during flood, stage discharge relation, design of water work structures. This work develops a model which can be used to simulate water surface profile in compound channel with vegetated floodplains with various vegetation covers. To predict the water surface, experiments have been conducted in the laboratory for different hydraulic conditions. It can be seen from the results that the trend of stage-discharge relationships is found to be an exponential function giving a high value of R2. A multivariable regression model (MRM) has been developed to predict the water surface profile for such channels. The dependency of water surface profiles on four different non-dimensional parameters such as canopy arrangement, canopy density, relative depth and relative distance are analyzed. Using the relevant experimental data, non-linear regression has been performed. The results obtained from the present water surface profile model shows good agreement with the observed data.