Hydrologic Information Extraction Based on Arc Hydro Tool and DEM

Extracting watershed features from DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is a very important task in Hydrologic study, and also it is the pre-process of hydrological simulation analysis. This paper introduces a very useful method for Hydrological simulation analysis based on extracting watershed features from DEM using Arc Hydro Tools. Arc Hydro is a geospatial data model especially GIS for Water Resources, developed for building hydrologic information systems to synthesize geospatial and temporal water resources data supporting hydrologic modeling and analysis. ESRI cooperated with the Center for Research in Water Resources (CRWR) at The University of Texas at Austin, based on GeoDatabase, designed and developed the Arc Hydro geospatial data model, which is specially used in hydrological data model. The whole procedure mainly includes five steps: DEM preprocessing, stream flow definition, accumulated grid generation, automatic stream network generation, watershed boundaries generation. In this study, Hillsborough River watershed, located in the central Florida, U.S. was selected as study area in this research. Arc Hydro Tools were used to extract watershed features and obtain the intended delineated watersheds for future hydrologic model research. The study results showed that, automatically extracting watershed features based on Arc Hydro tools is feasible and effective.