Calculating stream slopes from world DEMs

HydroSHEDS

Worldwide DEMs such as the SRTM DEM, especially the publicly available 3" (~90m) version, leave one struggling the define channels, much less calculate slope. We have leaned heavily on the HydroSHEDS version of the SRTM DEM. Longitudinal profiles of rivers were created by tracing from cell center to cell center. These profiles never (in the conditioned DEM) run uphill, and their geographic coordinates follow the actual rivers as well as human experts could determine. However, slopes cannot be trusted, if only because they are often stairstepped, with apparent flat spots and bogus waterfalls. Even a perfect DEM will generate problems in all but the steepest rivers when elevations are rounded to the nearest meter.

Once a profile graph is extracted from the GIS, there are myriad ways to smooth it. We adopted the strategy of extending our smoothing window to the next highest and lowest points, and imposing the additional constraint of looking a minimum distance (1, 2 or 4 km) upstream and downstream. The results can be seen below.

ASTER Global 1" DEM

Then we decided to extract better elevations from the DEM. While we were still mulling over techniques of doint this with the SRTM DEM, the 1" (~30m) Global DEM became available. Maintaining the stream points from hydrosheds (version 3?) as our offical river course, we For the Wang Chhu, the buffer size looks good. Too small a buffer will fail to catch useful points. Too large a buffer will catch points that are legitimately lower than the river channel.
The Wang Chhu is the major river of Bhutan. It continues across the India before joining with other rivers, entering Bangladesh, and flowing toward the Brahmaputra.
Here are three versions of the profile of the Wang Chhu. The hydroSHEDS profile looks well behaved, though the flat regions are unlikely to be real. The SRTM DEM is shows some spikiness. It would have looked better if we had been able to obtain a 3" DEM generated as the minimum of the 9 component 1" values. The ASTER GDEM is more spiky, and it shows some low spots that we would like to take a look at.
Above is the SRTM image of an area in the second box of the context map. The graph on the left is a detail of the full river profile. This area concerns us. If the GDEM contains bogus pits, our data filtering becomes much more difficult. The image on the right shows the 3" hydroSHEDS DEM, the profile created from it, and red points selected where the GDEM elevations were selected. The two big blue points are the troublesome pit on the graph.

This is a [15m lossy] Landsat image of the same area. It is flipped upside down for those of us who cannot interpret aerial/satellite photos illuminated from the bottom.
This is the 1" Global DEM with a special color stretch. The dip in our river profile is clearly visible as a feature of the river channel, comprising many data points and centered on the channel. This leads us to conclude that these are legitimate elevations, and that apparently higher areas downstream are artifacts of tree cover. The two pixels have 9 and 10 components values (The minimum value from 9 ASTER scenes was used.). This is typical for the area, though it seems that high points on the profile have lower data quality. We will look at this statistically later.

Here is one artifact of my clever method. Profile points has a small search area on the inside of curves. If the actual channel lies to the inside of the curve, that particular HydroSHEDS point is inhibited from searching the channel for a data point. The result is a spike in the profile. This is not a big problem, as we expect upward spikes and remove them.
Here is a similar artifact. Because of a poor match between the profile and the actual channel, a profile point has serched across an oxbow to find a data point. Such an error could result in a downward spike, but here it merely produces an upward spike.
Here we see our methodology start to fall apart as the Wang Chhu becomes a braided river near the Indian border. The river has moved considerably between the Landsat (~2000), SRTM (Feb, 2000?), and multiple ASTER passes.
This is the first place where I suspect that a floodplain is lower than the surface of the river. This is way upriver at about 2000 meters.
For the most part, the GDEM points define the channel better than HydroSHEDS, but there is some unacceptable noise in their path. Would it be possible to automate a redefining of the channel course? Would it be worth while to build a GIS team in Bhutan to refine the data sets? Don't forget tie scores. And what if we constructed perpendicular bisectors at each and searched for an alternate lowest point? Not so good, I suppose.

Now we have revisit our smoothing algorithm. For now we will assume that all bumps are artifacts and that no low points will be discarded. As our data is in integer meters, we cannot (except where points are discarded) represent non-zero slopes less than one meter over thirty meters. This is unacceptable even in Bhutan.

We have run this procedure on most of the Brahmaputra basin, and are starting to evaluate the results.

GDEM2

Version 2 of the ASTER Global DEM looks much better. We are looking forward to testing it with our existing algorithms.