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Carving and adaptive drainage enforcement of grid digital elevation models
Author(s) -
Soille Pierre,
Vogt Jürgen,
Colombo Roberto
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1029/2002wr001879
Subject(s) - digital elevation model , carving , elevation (ballistics) , terrain , flooding (psychology) , computer science , spurious relationship , geology , drainage , flow routing , grid , remote sensing , geodesy , geotechnical engineering , cartography , geography , engineering , psychology , ecology , structural engineering , archaeology , machine learning , psychotherapist , biology
An effective and widely used method for removing spurious pits in digital elevation models consists of filling them until they overflow. However, this method sometimes creates large flat regions which in turn pose a problem for the determination of accurate flow directions. In this study, we propose to suppress each pit by creating a descending path from it to the nearest point having a lower elevation value. This is achieved by carving, i.e., lowering, the terrain elevations along the detected path. Carving paths are identified through a flooding simulation starting from the river outlets. The proposed approach allows for adaptive drainage enforcement whereby river networks coming from other data sources are imposed to the digital elevation model only in places where the automatic river network extraction deviates substantially from the known networks. An improvement to methods for routing flow over flat regions is also introduced. Detailed results are presented over test areas of the Danube basin.