DEM in quantitative analysis of structural geomorphology: application and prospect

Abstract

Digital elevation model (DEM) is used to realize the digital simulation of terrain surface (i.e. the digital representation of terrain surface shape) through the limited terrain elevation data. As a new tool to describe the terrain, it provides a new field of vision for people to study the evolution process of the earth's surface. The application status of DEM in many fields are summerized in this paper, including basic topographic factors, watershed geomorphological features, reconstruction of paleogeomorphology, tectonic geomorphological development model, tectonic activity classification, geomorphological classification and environmental assessment, geomorphological parameter algorithms and computing platform development. Our research generally focuses on land, with river geomorphology and mountain geomorphology as the main objects. The research process changes from the early qualitative description of geomorphology to the semi-quantitative and quantitative analysis of a variety of geomorphological parameters. The research scale extends from a small watershed to the whole orogenic belt in space and from a few hours to millions of years in time. However, many factors can influence the accuracy of quantitative analysis results of tectonic geomorphology, such as the uncertainty of the time series of tectonic geomorphology evolution, the complexity of the acquisition of geomorphological parameters, the diversification of terrain model algorithms and the error factors in the process of DEM generation. Therefore, while summarizing the previous research results, some thoughts are given on the application of DEM in tectonic geomorphology.

Keywords

• tectonic geomorphology
• dem
• geomorphological parameters
• application progress