Geovisualization of Hydrological Flow in Hexagonal Grid Systems

Mingke Li, Heather McGrath and Emmanuel Stefanakis
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Mingke Li: Department of Geomatics Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
Heather McGrath: Canada Centre of Mapping and Earth Observation, Natural Resources Canada, Ottawa, ON K1A 0E4, Canada
Emmanuel Stefanakis: Department of Geomatics Engineering, Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada

Geographies, 2022, vol. 2, issue 2, 1-18

Abstract: Recent research has extended conventional hydrological algorithms into a hexagonal grid and noted that hydrological modeling on a hexagonal mesh grid outperformed that on a rectangular grid. Among the hydrological products, flow routing grids are the base of many other hydrological simulations, such as flow accumulation, watershed delineation, and stream networks. However, most of the previous research adopted the D6 algorithm, which is analogous to the D8 algorithm over a rectangular grid, to produce flow routing. This paper explored another four methods regarding generating flow directions in a hexagonal grid, based on four algorithms of slope aspect computation. We also developed and visualized hexagonal-grid-based hydrological operations, including flow accumulation, watershed delineation, and hydrological indices computation. Experiments were carried out across multiple grid resolutions with various terrain roughness. The results showed that flow direction can vary among different approaches, and the impact of such variation can propagate to flow accumulation, watershed delineation, and hydrological indices production, which was reflected by the cell-wise comparison and visualization. This research is practical for hydrological analysis in hexagonal, hierarchical grids, such as Discrete Global Grid Systems, and the developed operations can be used in flood modeling in the real world.

Keywords: discrete global grid systems; hydrological analysis; multi-resolution; terrain data; geovisualization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q15 Q5 Q53 Q54 Q56 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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