RIMORPHIS – A platform for discovering and processing river morphology data

Information on river shape, bed morphology and sediment load are critical to help inform research and management issues related to river channels. However, such information is not easily accessible and/or available in the public domain. RIMORPHIS (River Morphology Information System) fills this information gap by providing a web platform for aggregating, storing, sharing and analyzing river related scientific data. Additionally, it serves as a clearing house for river morphology data to help improve our overall understanding of rivers’ health using scientifically-rendered datasets. This presentation will provide an overview of RIMORPHIS, including its capabilities to access publicly available data in usable form, process and visualize river morphology data, interact with other river data repositories and interoperate with other community resources such as CUAHSI HydroShare. RIMORPHIS provides several tools for scientific analysis, including coordinate transformation of bathymetry points from cartesian coordinates to channel fitted coordinates, creating optimal configuration of cross-sections from irregularly spaced bathymetry points, generating bathymetry mesh, and creation of synthetic bathymetry using conceptual and deep learning models. Overall, RIMORPHIS aims to advance river morphology research by not only providing data to the community but also tools to process the data and produce new information.