What is CASCADE ?
CASCADE (CAtchment Sediment Connectivity And Delivery) is a modelling framework for sediment transport and connectivity in large rivers developed at Politecnico di Milano by the Environmental Intelligence team, in collaboration with UC Berkeley.
Large Scale Modelling
The model provides estimations of sediment fluxes and reach sediment budgets in the whole network and allows for the tracking of multiple sediment fluxes as they move throughout the system.
Data parsimonious
CASCADE takes advantage of the availability of geomorphic and hydrologic data in large-basins or at global scales to describe sediment connectivity in data scarce environments.
Numerically efficient
Low computational time, even for large networks, allows for extensive sensitivity analysis and applications in intregrated river basin planning
Open source
CASCADE is freely available, and is completed with fully-commented code, user manual and example workspaces.
Download
CASCADE toolbox is freely available, and requires MATLAB 2017b or higher, with the Text Analytics Toolbox and the Bioinformatics Toolbox. For the extraction of the river network graph from a Digital Elevation Model, CASCADE requires the functions from TopoToolbox 2.2, a Matlab based open souce software for topographic analysis (Schwanghart and Scherler, 2014).
People
Marco Tangi
marco.tangi@polimi.it
Post-Doc researcher at Politecnico di Milano
Rafael Schmitt
rschmitt@stanford.edu
Lead hydrologist and Post-Doc at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University
Simone Bizzi
simone.bizzi@unipd.it
Assistant professor at the department of Geosciences, Università di Padova
Andrea Castelletti
andrea.castelletti@polimi.it
Professor and head of the Environmantal Intelligence team at Politecnico di Milano.
Learn More
In these pages we provide short summaries on the main topics covered by CASCADE. The informations supplied are designed to just give a general idea of the themes involved, and are by no means exaustive. We suggest to use the provided references and the CASCADE manual for further informations.
What is CASCADE?
CASCADE (CAtchment Sediment Connectivity And Delivery) is a flexible modelling framework that aim to describe river sediment connectivity at basin scale.
More on CASCADE…
What is the CASCADE Toolbox?
CASCADE toolbox is an open source toolbox containing the operations necessary to run CASCADE on a river network extracted form a Digital Elevation Model and to interactively explore the model outputs.
More on the Toolbox…
What is river sediment connectivity?
Sediment connectivity is a fundamental property of river network. It describes the multiple sediment delivery processes occurring in the network, from sediment detachment from banks and hillslopes to sediment deposition in sinks and deltas. Preserving natural sediment connectivity is necessary for the well-being of the river systems and all the ecosystem and human populations depending on its resources and services.
More on river sediment connectivity…
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Cover artwork by Rafael Schmitt, other images from the NASA Earth Observatiory website.