UNIVERSITY OF OSLO, GEOSCIENCE DEPARTMENT, GEOMATICS

Flow routing methods using Digital Elevation Models

Nagy Robert 11/10/2013

1. Introduction Digital elevation models have become one of the most used materials in various fields of work due to their ease of use and their unique way of representing the earths surface. Digital elevation models represent simply the elevations, which are useful for visualizing the terrain, but the information obtained from derivatives of the DEMs are the things that characterize the terrain, and can be used for various analysis. These are the topographic attributes, which can be first order derivatives: slope and aspect, or second order derivatives: Plan curvature, profile curvature, tangential curvature. For this essay only Slope and Aspect will be used. Slope represents the rate of change of elevation in the direction of steepest descent; it is the path on which the water flows. There are multiple ways to calculate slope, a good example could be the D8 method which calculates the slope from the 8 nearest neighbors in the cardinal directions and in the diagonals. (Wilson and Gallant 2000) Aspect is also calculated using the first order derivatives; this is useful for visualizing the landscape. The formula of landscape takes into account the elevation changes in the X and Y direction, and the degrees are given clockwise from north. When the slope is very small the aspect cannot be defined, and should have a NO DATA value. It shows the direction to the neighbor with them maximum gradient ( the direction of the steepest descent). (Wilson and Gallant 2000) The primary derivatives of the surface can be used for multiple purposes like: modeling rockfall travel (Keylock and Domaas 1999), or solar radiation, wetness index, erosion index within the TAPES-G (Wilson and Gallant 2000), and also used for flow routing in hydrological modeling.((O'Callaghan and Mark 1984, Fairfield and Leymarie 1991, Quinn, Beven et al. 1991, Costa-Cabral and Burges 1994, Tarboton 1997, Qin, Zhu et al. 2007). Hydrology is the study of water movement, distribution throughout the Earth. Gravity is the main force that moves water, and its effect can be easily estimated from the DEMs. It is the path that a droplet of water would have on a smooth surface, from its place of contact to the sink, which is intuitively the steepest path at each given place. This is called a flow line. (Hengl and Reuter 2008). Multiple types of flow routing algorithms have been created to model the path of water on the DEM and we can categorize them as: Single neighbor flow algorithms : D8 algorithm (O'Callaghan and Mark 1984), Rho4 and Rho8 algorithm(Fairfield and Leymarie 1991) Multiple neighbor flow algorithms: FD8 method (Quinn, Beven et al. 1991),D((Tarboton 1997), DEMON(Costa-Cabral and Burges 1994), MFD (Qin, Zhu et al. 2007)

Each of the methods listed above have their own pro and cons, and although they are different in many ways they have things in common, and a good example would be the fact that all of them need to find a way to cope with pits, this is why some authors suggest filling up the DEM before applying the algorithm (O'Callaghan and Mark 1984) ,or how flow direction is given on flat areas. (Wilson and Gallant 2000). In all cases a 3x3 window is used in this algorithm, which moves in the DEM in order to determine the flow paths. 2.1 Single flow algorithms One of the single flow algorithms is deterministic 8 or D8, by O'Callaghan and Mark (1984). Drainage direction assessment is the direction to the neighbor, which has the lowest elevation compared to the central point. If there is no lower value than the central value, then through the algorithm, 0 value is added as undefined direction, which case only one value or output path is given. The distance in the direction of diagonal pixels are adjusted by a 1/sqrt2 factor, because of the longer path from cell center to cell center. The aspect is measured clockwise from north and it marks the direction of the steepest descent. This method can be used to delineate watersheds, and to create longitudinal profiles. But draining into one cell is also its biggest flaw. In reality water does not drain only in one cell, given the fact that the algorithm dictates that flow always drains from cell center to cell center, therefore aspect can have only values of multiple 45. The upslope contributing area is calculated by the cell area and the number of cells which reaches the point of interest. It is calculated recursively. Rho4 and Rho8 algorithm are single flow algorithms, similar to the D8 algorithm. Rho4 takes into account a random variable. It uses links to determine relationship between the cells. In this case there are only 4 directions NSEW. Considering a pixel p, if the 4 neighboring values are higher than p than the link(p) points to p. Else a Rhoslope is calculated from the pixel p to the EW neighbors with the formula Z(p)-Z(q), where q are the surrounding pixels . For NS neighbors, the slope is calculated by: rho4*( Z(p)-Z(q)), where rho4 is a random variable which can have a value between 0 and infinity. For the Rho8 method, in case of the p pixel having lower values than the surrounding 8 pixels then link(p) to p, but if not, then for NESW neighbors the rhoslope8 is calculated Z(p)-Z(q) and for the corners (diagonal directions), rho8*( Z(p)-Z(q) )where rho8 is a variable taking values between 1 and 0,5. Basically the algorithm identifies the down slope pixels and takes a random variable to direct the flow to one of these pixels on a probability base: the pixels with a higher value have a higher probability of being chosen. Both of the methods above have the one thing in common. Given the fact that they are single flow algorithm they have the capacity to handle convergent flows, but have no possibility to handle divergent flow.

2.2 Multiple-neighbor flow algorithms These algorithms have the capacity of handling divergent flows, thus enabling the possibility of routing the flow in more than one cell, which are important on hill slopes. FD8 The distributed model needs to show the flow pathway of water, and also the variations in the flow velocity, while it is routed to the catchment outlet. In the distributed model, topography can play an important role, and it can be used in order to determine the gravitational potential, giving the possibility to model the spatial variability in flow pathways and velocities. The multiple flow algorithm takes into account the cumulative upslope area and the slope angle at the point using formula ln(a/tan ). For this a is calculated using the upslope area A and the contour length, orthogonal to the direction of flow a=A/L. Water is draining through each cell of the grid in the down slope direction proportionally to the gradient of downhill path, in which case the steepest slopes attract more water. This method gives a more realistic pattern of how water accumulates in the hillslope portion, but once in the flow has entered into the permanent drainage system the D8 algorithm gives better results. The multiple flow direction can be improved by overlaying it with the permanent drainage system. The formula which attributes the drainage fraction is:
-slope L-contour lenght v-exponent controling dispersion in (equal to 1 in this algorithm

In contrast with other applications, in the DEMON algorithm, the flow is generated areally not by point source. The flow generated over a pixel is projected downstream over a 2D flow strip (tube). Flow direction is generated through the local aspect angle. For determining the flow angle it is necessary to know the elevation field. For this, an elevation surface is fitted to the DEM. The simplest surface fitting method implies finding a way to approximate the surface of each pixel, by fitting a plane using local interpolation. DEMON uses a planar surface, cause of the computation of single flow direction within each pixel is simpler, and the elevation tensor of each pixel can be given by a vector which takes into account the four corners of the pixels. Flow is a direction of vectors indicated by the aspect angle . Demon downslope is a particle tracking algorithm that uses a matrix to project down slope flow, computing both SCA and SDA. In the Demon upslope algorithm the boundaries of the contributing area is traced and the area of the enclosed lines is calculated. An interesting concept is that if water cannot flow directly into diagonal directions. If water needs to flow in diagonal directions it first flows into the cardinal directions and from there, it flows into the diagonal ones. The author of the D(Tarboton 1997) recognizes the advantages of aspect driven flow routing, by assigning single flow direction to each cell(it has a value between 0 and 360)

determined by the steepest downwards slope. It uses triangular facets through a 3x3 window centered on the pixel of interest to do this. This triangular facet avoids the fitting the plane and the influence of higher neighbors. Where the direction follows the cardinal and diagonal directions then the flow goes to those cells, when they do not follow the cardinal directions then the flow is apportioned between the two downslope pixels according to how close they are to the centre of the two pixels. To implement this, the centers of the pixels are needed (elevation data) and the distances between the pixel centers to compute slope. From there slope direction and magnitude is calculated. After the calculation of the local angle from the triangle, it is transformed so that it represents the real orientation of the slope. Similar to D8 pixels from flat areas are flagged and ultimately they drain into a pixel that has a lower value. The MFD algorithm introduced by Qin, Zhu et al. (2007) is an adaptive method, which modifies the FD8 algorithm of Quinn, Beven et al. (1991). It is based on the theory that terrain conditions control flow partitioning at each cell. Its better to use local topographic attributes than the global attributes to determine the flow partition exponent. This algorithm has two steps: selection of topographic attributes, which can directly describe the effect of local terrain, and the construction of a function f(e) for computing the flow partition exponent which adapts to the local terrain conditions. The local topographic attribute used principally is the downslope gradient. The most appropriate for the flow partition scheme is the maximum downslope gradient. The decision is based on 2 principles: its the local topographic gradient that can express the local terrain conditions and its not sensitive to local subtle variations. The flow partition exponent using the maximum downslope gradient, f(e) can properly model the effects of the maximum downslope gradient. When the value of the downslope gradient is large then the value of f(e) should be large accordingly to the model of convergent flow. If the downslope gradient is small then also the f(e) should be small. So a linear function was chosen in order to compute it. The formulas used to compute the dispersal and the exponent are:
Where: min(e,1) is the minimum between e and 1

The figure 1 below shows how the algorithms behave under the same terrain conditions.

Figure 1. Algorithms behaving under the same terrain conditions, modified after Wilson, Aggett et al. (2008).

Figure 1. (Continuied)

3. Conclusions and discussions Various flow routing algorithms were described above, both single neighborhood flow and multiple neighborhood flow algorithms. And every one of them has its own pro and cons. The D8 is a good algorithm to create longitudinal profiles of the route, but it does not have the capacity to handle divergent flow. And the same applies to the Rho8, and also the randomness makes it useless for scientific research. The FD8 method it introduces the multiple flow path capacity but it is characterized by over dispersion. The DEMON algorithm tries to determine the flow route through a tube, but the program is overly complex with lots of conditions and exceptions. The D handles well the dispersion but its main flow it is not adaptive to local terrain conditions. (Tarboton 1997). So one could say that there are no good or bad methods, it all depends for what they are used for, and what are the needs of the operator. 4. References:
1. Costa-Cabral, M. C. and S. J. Burges (1994). "Digital Elevation Model Networks (DEMON): A model of flow over hillslopes for computation of contributing and dispersal areas." Water Resources Research 30(6): 1681-1692. 2. Fairfield, J. and P. Leymarie (1991). "Drainage networks from grid digital elevation models." Water Resources Research 27(5): 709-717. 3. Hengl, T. and H. I. Reuter (2008). Geomorphometry: concepts, software, applications, Access Online via Elsevier. 4. Keylock, C. and U. Domaas (1999). "Evaluation of topographic models of rockfall travel distance for use in hazard applications." Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research: 312-320. 5. O'Callaghan, J. F. and D. M. Mark (1984). "The extraction of drainage networks from digital elevation data." Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing 28(3): 323-344. 6. Qin, C., A. X. Zhu, T. Pei, B. Li, C. Zhou and L. Yang (2007). "An adaptive approach to selecting a flowpartition exponent for a multipleflowdirection algorithm." International Journal of Geographical Information Science 21(4): 443-458. 7. Quinn, P., K. Beven, P. Chevallier and O. Planchon (1991). "The prediction of hillslope flow paths for distributed hydrological modelling using digital terrain models." Hydrological Processes 5(1): 59-79. 8. Tarboton, D. G. (1997). "A new method for the determination of flow directions and upslope areas in grid digital elevation models." Water Resources Research 33(2): 309-319. 9. Wilson, J. P., G. Aggett, D. Yongxin and C. S. Lam (2008). Water in the Landscape: A Review of Contemporary Flow Routing Algorithms. Advances in Digital Terrain Analysis. Q. Zhou, B. Lees and G.-a. Tang, Springer Berlin Heidelberg: 213-236. 10. Wilson, J. P. and J. C. Gallant (2000). Terrain Analysis: Principles and Applications, Wiley.