Advances in Earth Science ›› 2002, Vol. 17 ›› Issue (5): 769-775. doi: 10.11867/j.issn.1001-8166.2002.05.0769

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APPLICATION OF DIGITAL TERRAIN ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGY FOR DISTRIBUTED HYDROLOGICAL MODELLING

LI Shuo, ZENG Zhi-yuan, ZHANG Yun-sheng   

  1. Geography Department of Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210097 China
  • Received:2001-07-10 Revised:2001-12-01 Online:2002-12-20 Published:2002-10-01

LI Shuo,ZENG Zhi-yuan,ZHANG Yun-sheng. APPLICATION OF DIGITAL TERRAIN ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGY FOR DISTRIBUTED HYDROLOGICAL MODELLING[J]. Advances in Earth Science, 2002, 17(5): 769-775.

Topography is important to the description, quantification and interpretation of many biosphere processes.  Examples of such processes in the field of hydrology include: surface runoff and water storage, energy fluxes, evapo-transpiration, soil erosion and snow metamorphosis.  Extracting topographic information for a watershed by traditional, manual techniques can be a tedious, time consuming, subjective, and error-prone task, particularly for large watersheds.
    Research over the past decades has demonstrated the feasibility of extracting topographic information directly from raster Digital elevation models (DEM) through digital terrain analysis technologies. In the field of distributed hydrological modelling, automated evaluation of DEMs has focused on watershed segmentation, definition of drainage divides and identification of the drainage networks. This automated extraction of network and subwatershed properties from DEMs represents a convenient and rapid way to parameterize a watershed. This techniques also have the advantage of generating digital data that can be readily managed and analyzed by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) ,and the extracted topographic features also can be directly input for hydrological models.
Based on our research work of NSFC Program “Integration and Systematization of Mathematic Models for Soil and Water Resource Study in a Basin and Its Application”, the paper analyzed the methods of the digital terrain analysis technologies to watershed distributed hydrological modeling. A raster digital elevation models of Lianshui Basin is used to define surface drainage, extract the drainage networks, subdivide the whole watershed into 79 subbasins, and calculate representative subbasin parameters. The D8 and burn-in methods are mainly introduced. The result show that the drainage network and subbasins extracted from DEM are acceptable as compared with that of manual digitizations from 1∶100000 topography map. All these research  works provide a solid foundation for further development of distributed hydrological modeling.

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