malstroem

Tools for screening of bluespots and water flow between bluespots

Features

malstroem provides command line tools and a python api to calculate:

  • Depressionless (filled, hydrologically conditioned) elevation models
  • Surface flow directions
  • Accumulated flow
  • Blue spots
  • Local watershed for each bluespot
  • Pour points (point where water leaves blue spot when it is filled to its maximum capacity)
  • Flow paths between blue spots
  • Fill volume at specified rain incidents
  • Spill over between blue spots at specified homogeneous rain incidents

Assumptions

malstroem makes some assumptions to simplify calculations. The most important ones which you must be aware of:

Note

  • malstroem assumes that the terrain is an impermeable surface. This may change in a later version.
  • malstroem does not know the concept of time. This means that the capacity of surface streams is infinite no matter the width or depth. Streams won´t flow over along their sides. The end result is the situation after infinite time, when all water has reached its final destination.
  • Water flows from one cell to one other neighbour cell (the D8 method).
  • The DEM used must cover an entire drainage basin (or more basins) in order to estimate correct stream flows from all upstream sub-watersheds within the basins.

Example usage

Calculate all derived data including vectorization of bluespot, wateshed and streams rasters for 10mm and 30mm rain incidents ignoring bluespots where the maximum water depth is less than 5cm:

malstroem complete -r 10 -r 30 -filter "maxdepth > 0.5" -vector -dem dem.tif -outdir c:\outputdirectory

Indices and tables