Rarefied particle motions on hillslopes – Part 3: Entropy

Furbish, David Jon; Williams, Sarah G. W.; Doane, Tyler H.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-9-615-2021

Articles | Volume 9, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-9-615-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-9-615-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 9, issue 3

Research article

|

16 Jun 2021

Research article |

| 16 Jun 2021

Rarefied particle motions on hillslopes – Part 3: Entropy

David Jon Furbish, Sarah G. W. Williams, and Tyler H. Doane

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Final revised paper (published on 16 Jun 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 08 Dec 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: '3) Entropy', Joris Heyman, 01 Feb 2021
RC2: 'Review of: Rarefied particle motions on hillslopes: 3. Entropy', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Feb 2021
AC1: 'Response to referee comments', David J. Furbish, 26 Mar 2021

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by David J. Furbish on behalf of the Authors (27 Mar 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Apr 2021) by Eric Lajeunesse

RR by Joris Heyman (21 Apr 2021)

ED: Publish as is (23 Apr 2021) by Eric Lajeunesse

ED: Publish as is (29 Apr 2021) by Douglas Jerolmack (Editor)

AR by David J. Furbish on behalf of the Authors (30 Apr 2021)

Short summary

The generalized Pareto distribution of particle travel distances on steep hillslopes, as described in two companion papers (Furbish et al., 2021a, 2021b), is a maximum entropy distribution. This simply represents the most probable way that a great number of particles become distributed into distance states, subject to a fixed total energetic cost due to frictional effects of particle–surface collisions. The maximum entropy criterion is equivalent to a formal application of Occam's razor.