Sheyenne River Predictive Geomorphic Analysis

One of several alternatives under consideration to reduce flood damages for the Devils Lake area (North Dakota) is to pump excess water from Devils Lake to the neighboring Sheyenne River. The purpose of the study presented in this paper was to provide reasonable predictions of the future behavior of the Sheyenne River under different hydrologic and project assumptions. Although the project work included a number of interesting challenges, this paper focuses on determination of dominant discharge for the river. Changes in channel dimensions were predicted by selecting the dominant (or channel forming) discharge at precision cross sections and applying these to regime equations. The SAM program stable channel methodology was found to predict channel parameters for existing conditions closest to those observed. Therefore, this relationship was also used to predict future channel dimensions.