Application of digital elevation model in delineating drainage networks

1 Introduction1 Drainage network is of wide application in hydrological and geomorphological studies. It can be used for not only rainfall-runoff simulations on the watershed but also simulations of the transport of non-point source pollutants. Drainage network composition data can be used for geomorphologic evaluations 1]. Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is digital records of terrain elevations for ground positions, and is also the main data for watershed analyses, which usually has three fo…

Application of digital elevation model in delineating drainage networks

A practical method to extract drainage network from DEM (digital elevation model) is introduced. DEM pretreatment includes depression and flat areas treatment. The flow direction of each grid cell in DEM is calculated according to the 8-direction pour point model, and then the flow accumulation grid from the flow direction grid. With the flow accumulation grid, streams are defined according to the given threshold value of flow accumulation. Taking Gufo River watershed as an example, the extraction of drainage network was done from DEM. The results are basically consistent with the digitized drainage network from the relief maps.