Abstract
The advancements and new techniques in information technologies are making it possible to acquire large-scale spatial data through satellites, radars and sensor networks. The collection of vast amounts of environmental data increased the demand for applications which can manage and process large-scale and high-resolution data sets in real-time. One of the important tasks for organizing and customizing hydrological data sets is the delineation of watersheds on demand. Watershed delineation is a process for creating a boundary that represents the contributing area for a specific control point or water outlet, with the intent of characterization and analysis of portions of a study area. Although many GIS tools and software are available for watershed analysis on desktop systems, there is a need for optimized libraries for client-side and server-side web applications for creating a dynamic and interactive environment for exploring hydrological data. In this project, we developed and demonstrated several watershed delineation techniques on the web, with seven different use cases implemented on the client-side using JavaScript, WebAssembly, and WebGL and on the server-side using Python, Go, C, and Node.js. We also developed a client-side GPGPU (General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit) algorithm to analyze high-resolution terrain data for watershed delineation by benefiting from the parallelizable nature of GPUs. The web-based real-time analysis of watershed segmentation can be helpful for decision-makers and stakeholders while eliminating the need of installing complex software packages and dealing with large-scale data sets.
Highlights
Ever expanding sensor networks that collects high-resolution spatial datasets provide many opportunities for hydrological sciences [9], while bringing challenges in large-scale data handling and processing [25]
While the hydrologic network data generated by the aforementioned algorithms are widely exploited by watershed delineation applications, they can be used for other tasks in hydrology
Even though this study presents a software package for real-time watershed delineation implemented in a variety of programming languages, there are still other programming languages researchers and programmers may have employed in their projects
Summary
Ever expanding sensor networks that collects high-resolution spatial datasets provide many opportunities for hydrological sciences [9], while bringing challenges in large-scale data handling and processing [25]. There are many challenging tasks that employ sensor networks regarding organization and customization of the datasets [8] within a watershed for users dealing with the data. Delineation of the watershed can be defined as finding the catchment area of a point [2]. Algorithms including D8, Rho8 [11] and D8-LTD are used to create grid-based flow matrices from the digital elevation model (DEM) data. DEMs are rectangular grid-shaped datasets that provide elevation information of the surface at discrete geolocations [17]. While the hydrologic network data generated by the aforementioned algorithms are widely exploited by watershed delineation applications, they can be used for other tasks in hydrology. The D8 algorithm is the most used one among those methods [22] and, the data used within this study is generated by taking advantage of the D8 algorithm
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