DEVELOPING WATERSHED ANALYSIS TOOL IN GIS ENVIRNOMENT

Abstract

The process of deriving the hydrological parameters in the GIS environment requires semi-automated procedures that depend on the user’s experience with the tools designed within the system, and this in turn may cause technical errors as a result of implementing the sequential steps that address an issue, so there was a need to develop tools that depend on the total automated derivation reduce the number of steps while reducing the time required for implementation. As a result, in the presented work, a hydrological toll was created as an automated workflow using Python and ArcGIS Model Builder, which will be explained. The workflow for this tool was developed in Python and applied to Iraq's northeast region. Through the statistical comparison of all derived stream configuration results using DEM, an ideal threshold value was found to maximize drainage configuration. The code was successful in automatically estimating the right ranking of specified stream orders without any further manual processes. Therefore, the developed tool saves effort and time, making it an extremely valuable function for large catchment basins.

Keywords

GIS, DEM, ArcGIS Model, Python