Carving and adaptive drainage enforcement of grid digital elevation models

Abstract

An effective and widely used method for removing spurious pits in digital elevation models consists of filling them until they overflow. However, this method sometimes creates large flat regions which in turn pose a problem for the determination of accurate flow directions. In this study, we propose to suppress each pit by creating a descending path from it to the nearest point having a lower elevation value. This is achieved by carving, i.e., lowering, the terrain elevations along the detected path. Carving paths are identified through a flooding simulation starting from the river outlets. The proposed approach allows for adaptive drainage enforcement whereby river networks coming from other data sources are imposed to the digital elevation model only in places where the automatic river network extraction deviates substantially from the known networks. An improvement to methods for routing flow over flat regions is also introduced. Detailed results are presented over test areas of the Danube basin.