Upgraded Hydrologic Analysis Tools Now Available

For the past decade OpenTopography has offered on-demand tools for hydrologic processing of topography. These tools enable hydrologically conditioning of DEMs, calculation of contributing area and flow paths, and topographic wetness index. OpenTopography has recently updated our hydrologic routing service with a new toolset built on Whitebox Workflows (WbW). Our previous hydrologic analysis service relied on the Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models (TauDEM) toolset, which depended on high-performance computing run across shared resources, an arrangement that sometimes led to outages and failed jobs.

The original TauDEM service relied on tooling developed by Dr. David Tarboton's group at Utah State University and was deployed as a scalable terrain analysis service through a collaboration with the NSF's XSEDE program in 2014. Integrating TauDEM into the raster processing suite let researchers run compute-intensive hydrologic analysis on high-performance computing systems at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, such as the Gordon, Comet, and Expanse supercomputers without having to operate HPC themselves.

The new WbW tools provide a comparable set of hydrologic analysis capabilities while improving on the previous system in several key ways. In addition to the previous capabilities, the new service generates vectorized stream networks in shapefile format, produces browse imagery, and offers greater computational efficiency, and increased reliability. On the backend, the change simplifies maintenance for the OpenTopography team and improves the overall availability of the toolset.

The new hydrologic analysis tools can be accessed under the "advanced services" section of any OpenTopography Portal data access and processing job. Users must be logged into OpenTopography to access these tools.