Influence of model formulation on the critical morphological acceleration factor: an analytical study

The morphological acceleration factor (Morfac) has been used for over two decades to speed-up long term morphodynamic simulations. However, the Morfac values are usually set heuristically and hardly any study investigated theoretically the critical Morfac value leading to a predefined level of accuracy. In this research, we evaluated theoretically the critical Morfac value from the analysis of the amplitude and phase errors induced by the use of Morfac. While the few existing studies focused only on relatively low Froude numbers and a single mathematical formulation of the morphodynamic model, we consider here a significantly wider range of Froude numbers, including supercritical flow, and we compare four different model formulations. We show that the model formulation leading to the highest critical Morfac values for subcritical flow is not the same as for supercritical flow.