Stream Definition With Drop Analysis

This input is a grid of elevation values. As a general rule, it is recommended that you use a grid of elevation values that have had the pits removed for this input. Pits are generally taken to be artifacts that interfere with the analysis of flow across them. This grid can be obtained as the output of the "Pit Remove" tool, in which case it contains elevation values where the pits have been filled to the point where they just drain.

A grid of D8 flow directions which are defined, for each cell, as the direction of the one of its eight adjacent or diagonal neighbors with the steepest downward slope.

A grid of contributing area values for each cell that were calculated using the D8 algorithm. The contributing area for a cell is the sum of its own contribution plus the contribution from all upslope neighbors that drain to it, measured as a number of cells or the sum of weight loadings. This grid can be obtained as the output of the "D8 Contributing Area" tool. In this tool, it is the contributing area (A) that is compared in the formula A > ML^y to determine the transition to a stream.

This grid nominally accumulates some characteristic or combination of characteristics of the watershed. The exact characteristic(s) varies depending on the stream network raster algorithm being used. This grid needs to have the property that grid cell values are monotonically increasing downslope along D8 flow directions, so that the resulting stream network is continuous. While this grid is often from an accumulation, other sources such as a maximum upslope function will also produce a suitable grid.

This optional input is a grid that is used to mask the domain of interest and output is only provided where this grid is >= 0. A common use of this input is to use a D-Infinity contributing area grid as the mask so that the delineated stream network is constrained to areas where D-infinity contributing area is available, replicating the functionality of an edge contamination mask.

This is a comma delimited text file with the following header line:

Threshold, DrainDen, NoFirstOrd, NoHighOrd, MeanDFirstOrd, MeanDHighOrd, StdDevFirstOrd, StdDevHighOrd, T

The file then contains one line of data for each threshold value examined, and then a summary line that indicates the optimum threshold value. This technique looks for the smallest threshold in the range where the absolute value of the t-statistic is less than 2. For the science behind the drop analysis, see Tarboton et al. (1991, 1992), Tarboton and Ames (2001).

This is an indicator grid (1,0) that indicates the location of streams, with a value of 1 for each of the stream cells and 0 for the remainder of the cells.