Efficient automatic watershed delineation tool. (c1999)

Abstract

Water is an essential element of everyday life. Water is used for drinking, to cultivate crops, for irrigation, recreation, manufacturing, hydroelectric power and a whole variety of other daily life uses. As water leads to the receiving river, lake or stream it collects and is affected by both the uses and the conditions of the watershed land that it traverses. Delineating the physical boundary of the drainage area is the first step. The principal components of a watershed drainage basin are its topographic form and the topologic structure of its drainage network. The delineation and quantification of these components is tedious and time consuming when accomplished manually. The automated determination of these components is an ideal application of GIS technology. Some GIS packages like ARCInfo include tools and functions that help in defining watersheds. But these packages require fast workstations and advanced operating systems. For example, the hydrological functions in ARCInfo are not found in the PC version of the package because of the intensive processing they need. In this work we have put together an automatic tool to delineate watersheds making efficient use of as little a resource as a PC. Out technique derives watershed boundaries from a digital contour map.