Nature offers a vast variety of complex patterns and shapes continuously changing in time. These patterns are often the visual expression of geomorphic flows involving either liquids, which shape river and cave systems or surface karst features or granular materials like in the case of of dunes, sand ripples but also rock or snow avalanches, lahars or mudflows. Understanding of the physical principles behind these transport processes is one of the major challenges in geomorphology.

In the recent years the rapid increase in computational power and parallelization via GPU computing has opened the possibility to create numerical models which derive from first principle physical concepts. Additionally table-top laboratory analog experiments are becoming an increasingly popular tool to get insight into scaling laws and dynamics of more complex natural systems; theoretical methods successfully link the ideas of modern mathematical physics (free boundary problems, interfacial dynamics, conformal and potential analysis) with the more traditional semi-analytic approaches based on scaling analysis.

Our session combines contributions that seek a deeper understanding of pattern-generating geophysical flow processes through interdisciplinary work ranging from numerical modelling of granular fluid flows like turbidity currents, landslides or of bedload transport in rivers over theoretical and experimental work on reactive flows on porous media to LiDAR analysis of coastal zones.