A Scalable High-performance Topographic Flow Direction Algorithm for Hydrological Information Analysis

Hydrological information analyses based on Digital Elevation Models (DEM) provide hydrological properties derived from high-resolution topographic data represented as an elevation grid. Flow direction is one of the most computationally intensive functions in the current implementation of TauDEM, a broadly used high-performance hydrological analysis software in hydrology community. Hydrologic flow direction defines a flow field on the DEM that directs flow from each grid cell to one or more of its neighbors. This is a local computation for the majority of grid cells, but becomes a global calculation for the geomorphologically motivated procedure in TauDEM to route flow across flat regions. As the resolution of DEM becomes higher, the computational bottleneck of this function hinders the use of these DEM data in large-scale studies. This paper presents an efficient parallel flow direction algorithm that identifies spatial features (e.g., flats) and reduces the number of sequential and parallel iterations needed to compute their geomorphologically motivated flow direction. Numerical experiments show that our algorithm outperformed the existing parallel D8 algorithm in TauDEM by two orders of magnitude. The new parallel algorithm exhibited desirable scalability on Stampede and ROGER supercomputers.

[1]  R. Colombo,et al.  Carving and adaptive drainage enforcement of grid digital elevation models , 2003 .

[2]  Matthew Baker,et al.  Extraction of hydrological proximity measures from DEMs using parallel processing , 2011, Environ. Model. Softw..

[3]  Frédéric Darboux,et al.  A fast, simple and versatile algorithm to fill the depressions of digital elevation models , 2002 .

[4]  Jin Teng,et al.  Impact of DEM accuracy and resolution on topographic indices , 2010, Environ. Model. Softw..

[5]  Y. Mukaigawa,et al.  Large Deviations Estimates for Some Non-local Equations I. Fast Decaying Kernels and Explicit Bounds , 2022 .

[6]  John F. O'Callaghan,et al.  The extraction of drainage networks from digital elevation data , 1984, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[7]  A. Haile,et al.  Effects of LIDAR DEM resolution in flood modelling : a model sensitivity study for the city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras , 2005 .

[8]  P. Soille,et al.  Automated basin delineation from digital elevation models using mathematical morphology , 1990 .

[9]  Richard Barnes,et al.  An efficient assignment of drainage direction over flat surfaces in raster digital elevation models , 2015, Comput. Geosci..

[10]  D. Tarboton.  A new method for the determination of flow directions and upslope areas in grid digital elevation models , 1997 .

[11]  Azriel Rosenfeld,et al.  Computer Vision , 1988, Adv. Comput..

[12]  J. Fairfield,et al.  Drainage networks from grid digital elevation models , 1991 .

[13]  David G. Tarboton,et al.  Generalized terrain-based flow analysis of digital elevation models , 2009 .

[14]  C. Lynch.  Big data: How do your data grow? , 2008, Nature.

[15]  R. M. Wallace,et al.  Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models , 2001 .

[16]  David G. Tarboton,et al.  On the extraction of channel networks from digital elevation data , 1991 .

[17]  L. Martz,et al.  The assignment of drainage direction over flat surfaces in raster digital elevation models , 1997 .

[18]  Zhenyu Zhang,et al.  Drainage network extraction using LiDAR‐derived DEM in volcanic plains , 2010 .

[19]  Robert B. Ross,et al.  Using MPI-2: Advanced Features of the Message Passing Interface , 2003, CLUSTER.

[20]  Zhenyu Zhang,et al.  High-resolution DEM generated from LiDAR data for water resource management , 2005 .

[21]  Yan Liu,et al.  Accelerating TauDEM as a Scalable Hydrological Terrain Analysis Service on XSEDE , 2014, XSEDE '14.

[22]  Richard Barnes,et al.  Priority-Flood: An Optimal Depression-Filling and Watershed-Labeling Algorithm for Digital Elevation Models , 2015, Comput. Geosci..

[23]  David G. Tarboton,et al.  Parallel Flow-Direction and Contributing Area Calculation for Hydrology Analysis in Digital Elevation Models , 2009, PDPTA.