{"id":937,"date":"2014-07-09T14:51:09","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T18:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/?p=937"},"modified":"2014-10-08T17:53:25","modified_gmt":"2014-10-08T21:53:25","slug":"calculating-stream-sinuosity-in-esri-products","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/?p=937","title":{"rendered":"Calculating stream sinuosity (in esri products)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A river\u2019s <strong>sinuosity<\/strong> is its tendency to meander back and forth across its floodplain, in an S-shaped pattern, over time. As the stream moves across the landscape, it may leave behind evidence of where the river channel once was (these can take the form of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Meander_scar\">meander scars<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oxbow_lake\">oxbow lakes<\/a>). These patterns usually appear in stream channels found in softer sediments. If a river&#8217;s course is bedrock-controlled, other factors\u2014primarily rock strength and structure\u2014control the river&#8217;s flow. Few stream courses are completely straight, and most exhibit meanders.<\/p>\n<p>If you ever work with hydrologic data in GIS, you may wish to determine the sinuosity for an entire river or a particular &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reach_(geography)\">reach<\/a>&#8216; of a river of interest. A stream that doesn&#8217;t meander at all has a sinuosity of 1. The more meanders in a stream, the closer the sinuosity value will get to 0. Fortunately, it&#8217;s simple to determine the sinuosity of a line using either the field calculator or Python. Depending on the version of GIS software you are using, the method differs. See <a href=\"http:\/\/forest.mtu.edu\/faculty\/hyslop\/gis\/sinuosity.html\">this post<\/a> for details for ArcView 3 (old!) and ArcMap 8.x-10.2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A river\u2019s sinuosity is its tendency to meander back and forth across its floodplain, in an S-shaped pattern, over time. As the stream moves across the landscape, it may leave behind evidence of where the river channel once was (these &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/?p=937\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[119,118,26,120,27,121],"class_list":["post-937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to","category-information","tag-analysis","tag-field-calculator","tag-gis","tag-hydrology","tag-sinuosity","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=937"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":993,"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937\/revisions\/993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gis.mtu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}