Is there anyway that I define my streamline, and let taudem generates the catchments that contribute to each streamlines?

[WindingWinter]

In taudem, the software can generate the streamlines and the catchments that contribute to each of the streamline.

What if I for the particular plan, I already have the streamlines ( that the surveyor defines), can I use it to override the streamlines defined by taudem? And how can I do it? I still need taudem to tell me what is the catchments/contributing area to each of the streamline.

[dtarb]

Here is how I have approached this. The premise is that the surveyed streamlines provide superior information to the DEM. Where we have done this we have assumed that the surveyed streamlines help remove artificial barriers at road crossings. I gave the following presentation that included the approach we have used Tarboton, D., X. Zheng, D. Maidment and Y. Liu, (2017), "Using Digital Elevation Model Derived Height Above the Nearest Drainage for flood inundation mapping and determining river hydraulic geometry in ungauged basins," IAHS Scientific Assembly, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, July 10, 2017, http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/IAHS2017/IAHS2017-343.pdf.

The slides from this presentation are at http://hydrology.usu.edu/dtarb/Tarboton_IAHS2017_HAND_Presentation.pptx

You may want to jump right to slide 24

The procedure can be thought of in two parts

1. Etch the surveyed streams into the DEM
2. Map streams from the DEM using start points from the surveyed streams

Etching ### (This is described in the presentation)

1. Rasterize surveyed streams;
2. Lower the elevation of stream cells on DEM by 100m;
3. Remove pits on the burned DEM;
4. Derive D8 flow direction on the pit-removed DEM;
5. Keep D8 flow direction on stream cells only;
6. Call TauDEM:flowdircond to burn the original DEM. This is a new function not yet in the TauDEM GUI that modifies the DEM tracing down the given flow directions and changing elevations so that elevation is non increasing along flow directions.

Stream Mapping With Start points

Steps 2, 3, 4, 7 are part of the standard stream delineation recipe. Step 1 defines a grid giving the start points of the surveyed streams. Steps 5 and 6 use these to map streams.

1. Construct a weight raster "source" that holds a value 1 at the start point of each surveyed stream. There is not a TauDEM function for this, but I have used ArcGIS functions "Feature Vertices to Points" and "Feature to Raster" to achieve this. Doing this pay attention to Environments parameters to ensure that the source grid is the same dimensions as the DEM. See http://hydrology.usu.edu/dtarb/giswr/2017/Ex5_2017.pdf for a GIS class where this was done
2. Fill pits (e.g. mpiexec -n 4 pitremove -z Onion.tif -fel TauDEM\Onionfel.tif)
3. D8 Flow directions (e.g. mpiexec -n 4 D8FlowDir -fel TauDEM\Onionfel.tif -p TauDEM\Onionp.tif -sd8 TauDEM\Onionsd8.tif)
4. Area D8 (e.g. mpiexec -n 4 Aread8 -p TauDEM\Onionp.tif -ad8 TauDEM\Onionad8.tif)
5. Weighted Area D8 (e.g. mpiexec -n 4 Aread8 -p TauDEM\Onionp.tif -ad8 TauDEM\Onionssa.tif -wg source.tif).
6. Threshold to define streams (e.g. mpiexec -n 4 Threshold -ssa TauDEM\Onionssa.tif -src TauDEM\Onionsrc.tif -thresh 1). This results in a stream raster starting at surveyed streams
7. Stream network (e.g. mpiexec -n 8 StreamNet -fel TauDEM\Onionfel.tif -p TauDEM\Onionp.tif -ad8 TauDEM\Onionad8.tif -src TauDEM\Onionsrc.tif -ord TauDEM\Onionord.tif -tree TauDEM\Oniontree.txt -coord TauDEM\Onioncoord.txt -net TauDEM\Onionnet.shp -w TauDEM\Onionw.tif)

The resulting stream network is not exactly the same as the surveyed streamlines, but is a blending of this with DEM in a way that you get a consistent set of streamlines and catchments.