Study on the cell size in the simulation of a cellular automaton model for hillslope rill erosion

Jing Zhao, Binbing Li and Lei

Abstract

The erosion of The Loess Plateau could be regarded as one kind of representations of the huge complex system, which is the landform of topography. The complexity of the process is well reflected in an idealized nonlinear system called Cellular Automaton (CA) which is quite sensitive of the initialization and it may lead to an inestimable result just because of tiny differences of the initial sets. In this paper we produce a Hillslope Rill Erosion Cellular Automaton Model to find a better set of its cell size of the initial setting and implement it by a multi-agent programmable modeling environment called Netlogo. The result of this paper shows that the applicability of a certain range of cell size in Cellular Automata requires some degree of attention in the study of this area.