Morphological analysis of a braiding river stretch using Sentinel-2 data

This study uses Sentinel-2 data to analyze the morphological characteristic of a braiding river stretch in Kyrgyzstan. We calculate the river width, braiding intensity and wetted areas for 115 cloud-free images over the time period of 2017 to 2023. These characteris tics show a clear annual trend following the hydrological regime. In addition, water occurrence frequency maps provide insights in spatial changes of river characteristics and identify regions with highly mobile riverbeds. The results show that the methodology is suitable to calculate river planform characteristics which can be used to recognize hydrological changes and to locate changes in morphological processes, for example regions influenced by artificial barriers.