On the scaling behaviour of high-order structure functions to explore river bed roughness structures

An in-depth statistical analysis of the bed roughness structures before and after water-working was applied at the two different scales (i.e., the mesoscale and the grain scale). The results show that the unworked bed is characterized by a multiscaling behaviour that represents multifractality of the bed roughness structure. Instead, for the water-worked bed, a simple scaling is prevalent, implying that, at small spatial lags, a statistically self-similar characteristic is preserved.