Geomorphological transformation and prediction of urban meander loop: A case study of Barak River, India

Barak River is one of the highly meandering rivers in India causing several problems to society during flooding events. In this study geomorphological changes of an urban meander loop, situated at the main city of Silchar Assam, India was carried out. Based on the adopted analysis, it was found that meander length, meander width, meander ratio, wavelength showed an increasing trend while sinuosity and radius of curvature shows a decreasing trend.  The land use and land cover were also analyzed of this urban meander loop and found that settlement increased gradually by 16.1798 % and waterbodies, dense vegetation and agricultural land decreased by 0.5732 %, 2.5832 % and 13.1558%, respectively. Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was employed for the prediction and the results recommended that shifting of channel in the urban meander loop fluctuated unexpectedly either to rightwards or leftwards. Observed and predicted values of showed a determination coefficient (R² = 0.8). The final step of the research was to generate the predicted values of channel shifting up to 2030.