I am modeling a river reach flowing through an area of wetland, and now the hard part for me is, how to model the water exchange (through surface flow) between the wetland and the river channel. I read some discussions here, and I find there might be two alternatives:
First, to extend the river cross sections in the landward direction, so the wetland on both sides of the river can be modeled as floodplains.
My understanding is, this is still a 1D type of model since it doesn’t model the water between the cross sections directly, which is fine since my main purpose is to model the water in the channel. And the modeled water flow to the wetland might highly rely on the topography data of the wetland.
My question is how far should the cross section go inland? 100 m? 500 m? Do we need any boundary condition on the inland boundary?
Second, to model the wetland as water storage. But the question is, how many storage areas do we need to model the continuous wetlands on both sides of the channel?
I don’t know if there are any better options. Your comments are very appreciated!
