Extreme scenarios for the evolution of a soft bed interacting with a fluid using the Value at Risk of the bed characteristics

We show how to introduce the Value at Risk (VaR) concept in the analysis of the adaptation of the shape of a soft bed to a flow knowing the Probability Density Function (PDF) of the responses of the shape to flow perturbations (bed receptivity). Our aim is to quantify our confidence on simulation scenarios by an available morphodynamic model for the shape. The approach permits to perform this task at low complexity as it does not require any sampling of the bed receptivity parameter space. The paper goes beyond stationarity for the variability of the bed receptivity by linking its dynamics to the bottom morphodynamics through an original transport equation for the local bed receptivity standard deviation. The approach has been applied to the analysis of bed morphodynamics based on minimization principles. The results show the importance of including uncertainty information during the coupling and not only eventually through simple margins on the results.