Abstract
Depression (pit or sink) filling is a key preprocessing step for the automatic hydrologic analysis of surface topography. The Planchon and Darboux (P&D) algorithm is a widely used depression filling algorithm. In this study, we propose an improved variant over the fastest sequential variant of the P&D algorithm for depression filling. Our variant introduces two important improvements compared with the fastest variant of the P&D algorithm, and greatly reduces redundant computation, as well as requires less memory space. Our algorithm can be easily integrated into many of the existing hydrologic analysis software packages. Moreover, our algorithm shares the same versatility as the P&D algorithm. Depressions can be replaced with surfaces either strictly horizontal, or slightly sloping. In the latter case, it is easier to calculate the flow direction matrix.
Highlights
Digital elevation models (DEMs) are widely used in the automatic hydrologic analysis of surface topography [1,2,3,4]
Calculating the flow direction matrix from a DEM is an essential step for many hydrological analyses of surface topography [5,6]
We propose an efficient variant of the Planchon and Darboux (P&D) algorithm, which runs much faster and generally requires less memory space
Summary
Digital elevation models (DEMs) are widely used in the automatic hydrologic analysis of surface topography [1,2,3,4]. The P&D algorithm, and its parallel implementations, have been integrated into many open-source and commercial hydrologic analysis packages [20,26] and are widely used in the literature [24,27] It can replace depressions with slightly sloping surfaces and simplify the calculation of the flow direction matrix [5,9,23]. The DEM parameter is the original raster surface; the W is the water layer with the same size of the DEM and converges to the final depression-filled DEM; c is an unvisited cell in the DEM; f is a Boolean flag; n is a neighboring cell of c; ε is a very small positive number; m is a large number greater than or equal to the highest elevation in the original DEM.
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