Author(s): Bai Rui; Li Tiejian; Huang Yuefei; Wang Guangqian
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: Digital elevation model; Distributed hydrological simulation; Drainage network; Hierarchical method; Horton-Strahler order
Abstract: With increasing of DEM resolution, the number of drainage reaches extracted from a large scale river basin would increase sharply, so that millions of drainage reaches with information on geographical coordinate vectors, topological structure, and topographical parameters, result in significant difficulties in effective massive drainage network data management for large river basins. In this paper, based on the pyramid technique of grid data and the Horton-Strahler’s rule, a hierarchical method is proposed to organize drainage network data for large scale river basin. The proposed method consists of definition for levels of drainage network and structure and properties of drainage reach, reaches mergence operation and convergence algorithm, and hierarchical pyramid structure for drainage networks under different levels. The application results of the upper Yangtze River basin with 30m resolution DEM indicate that the developed hierarchical method is feasible and effective in managing massive data of drainage networks. Different levels of drainage networks can be stored in a geo-database for quickly data query and display. Moreover, the developed method keeps the self-similar binary tree structure of drainage network topologically, which is helpful in physically-based hydrological model simulation and fluvial geomorphologic analysis. The hierarchical method can also provide topological partition of a river basin with different levels of drainage networks for multi-scale distributed hydrological modeling so that scale effect can be investigated.
Year: 2013