Characterization of the irregularity of a terrain using fractal dimension of lakes' boundaries

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the fractal dimension of lake boundaries, derived from satellite images, can reveal regional irregularities and differences in terrain features across various geographic zones.

Contribution

It introduces a practical method to analyze terrain irregularity using fractal dimensions of lakes' boundaries from satellite imagery, focusing on Indian lakes around the Western Ghats.

Findings

Fractal dimensions of lakes' boundaries range from 1.2 to 1.6.

Lakes along the Western Ghats and in plains show narrower dimension distributions.

The method provides insights into regional terrain irregularities.

Abstract

Even though many objects and phenomena of importance in geophysics have been shown to have fractal character, there are still many of them which show self-similar character and yet to be studied. The objective of the present work is to demonstrate that the fractal dimension of the boundary of a natural water body can be used to shed light on irregularity as well as other properties of a region. Owing to easy availability of satellite images and image processing softwares this turns out to be a handy tool. In this study, we have analyzed several lakes in India mostly around the Western Ghats region. We find that the fractal dimension of their boundaries for the length scales between around 40 meters to 2 kilometers, in general, has broad variation from 1.2 to 1.6. But when they are grouped into three categories, viz., lakes along the ridge of Western Ghats, lakes in the planes and lakes in the mountain region, we find the first two groups to have a narrower distribution of dimensions.