Temporal evolutions of scour at submerged circular cylinders were investigated. Flow visualization was carried out around the cylinders over plane, under developed and equilibrium scour holes. Video analysis technique was used to formulate the equations for determining the diameter of the horseshoe vortex around the submerged cylinders, which is also verified from the vector diagrams drawn using the velocity measurements. The scour process similar to live bed scour was noticed around the downstream cylinder. The diameter of the horseshoe vortex is found to depend on the diameter of respective cylinder, submergence ratio, spacing between the cylinders and skew angle. This formulation along with the dislodgement and transportation of a single sediment particle is further incorporated in the proposed model for determining the time variation of scour around the submerged cylinders. It is evident from the results that the upstream cylinder shelters the downstream cylinder and thereby reduces the scour at the downstream cylinder. Proposed model is further extended to incorporate the effect of non-uniformity of the sediment particles on the time variation of scour depth. The results indicate significant reduction of scour depth of around 6％and 35％for upstream and downstream cylinders respectively due to the formation of the armor layer. The model is also compared with the local scour component of field data around cylindrical bridge piers to establish the differences in the scour process around a partially submerged cylinder and fully submerged tandem and skewed cylinders.