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Advances in hexagon mesh-based flow direction modeling

Journal Article · · Advances in Water Resources
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  1. Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
  2. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
  3. Univ. of Houston, TX (United States)
  4. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations
Watershed delineation and flow direction representation are the foundations of streamflow routing in spatially distributed hydrologic modeling. A recent study showed that hexagon-based watershed discretization has several advantages compared to the traditional Cartesian (latitude–longitude) discretization, such as uniform connectivity and compatibility with other Earth system model components based on unstructured mesh systems (e.g., oceanic models). Despite these advantages, hexagon-based discretization has not been widely adopted by the current generation of hydrologic models. One major reason is that there is no existing model that can delineate hexagon-based watersheds while maintaining accurate representations of flow direction across various spatial resolutions. In this study, we explored approaches such as spatial resampling and hybrid breaching-filling stream burning techniques to improve watershed delineation and flow direction representation using a newly developed hexagonal mesh watershed delineation model (HexWatershed). We applied these improvements to the Columbia River basin and performed 16 simulations with different configurations. The results show that (1) spatial resampling modulates flow direction around headwaters and provides an opportunity to extract subgrid information; and (2) stream burning corrects the flow directions in mountainous areas with complex terrain features.
Research Organization:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-76RL01830
OSTI ID:
1844992
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1863610
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA-160344
Journal Information:
Advances in Water Resources, Journal Name: Advances in Water Resources Vol. 160; ISSN 0309-1708
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Related Subjects

58 GEOSCIENCES
Flow routing
Stream burning
Unstructured mesh
Watershed delineation