Logo image
On computing generalized watershed boundaries of polygonal regions in digital elevation models
Thesis   Open access

On computing generalized watershed boundaries of polygonal regions in digital elevation models

Daniel Ethan Schwartz
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Drexel University
May 2020
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00001056
pdf
Schwartz_Daniel_20202.66 MBDownloadView

Abstract

Watershed management--Computer simulation Watersheds--Simulation methods Environmental sciences--Data processing Computer Science
Flow Direction Grids (FDGs) are commonly used to describe the effects of fluvial systems on the watershed or the local stream reach. We propose a novel alternative approach that captures all FDG cells within a surface flow distance that is less than or greater than a user-defined threshold. Existing techniques for identifying constrained watershed boundaries require manual computations that run in quadratic complexity as a function of the number of cells on their boundary. Our research describes a computational model to identify and retrieve watershed boundaries for arbitrary simple geometries where flow can be constrained by a user-defined threshold. Specifically, we propose a linear-time algorithm with respect to the length of the output geometric boundary to identify and retrieve constrained watershed boundaries for any query region. This algorithm leverages a novel data structure, the Constrained Modified Interval Search Tree.

Metrics

50 File views/ downloads
44 Record Views

Details

Logo image