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Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models (TauDEM)

TauDEM (Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Models) is a suite of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) tools for the extraction and analysis of hydrologic information from topography as represented by a DEM.

Website with latest release and detailed documentation: http://hydrology.usu.edu/taudem.

Answers to questions about TauDEM in the issue tracker

TauDEM provides the following capability:

• Development of hydrologically correct (pit removed) DEMs using the flooding approach
• Calculates flow paths (directions) and slopes
• Calculates contributing area using single and multiple flow direction methods
• Multiple methods for the delineation of stream networks including topographic form-based methods sensitive to spatially variable drainage density
• Objective methods for determination of the channel network delineation threshold based on stream drops
• Delineation of watersheds and subwatersheds draining to each stream segment and association between watershed and segment attributes for setting up hydrologic models
• Specialized functions for terrain analysis, including:
  • Calculates the slope/area ratio that is the basis for the topographic wetness index
  • Calculates both the distance up to ridges and down to streams in horizontal, vertical, along slope and direct variants
  • Maps locations upslope where activities have an effect on a downslope location
  • Evaluates upslope contribution subject to decay or attenuation
  • Calculates accumulation where the uptake is subject to concentration limitations
  • Calculates accumulation where the uptake is subject to transport limitations
  • Evaluates reverse accumulation
  • Evaluates potential avalanche runout areas

Features

• Uses the GDAL library for Input/Output to accommodate a broad class of raster files.
• Performs computations in geographic (latitude and longitude) as well as projected (planar) coordinates.
• Partitions domain into stripes to take advantage of parallel processing using message passing interface (MPI).
• Works on Windows PCs, laptops and UNIX clusters
• Includes a set of standalone command line executable programs and an ArcGIS toolbox Graphical User Interface (GUI)
• Command line executables are based on single set of source code for the command line execuables that is platform independent and can be compiled for both Window's PC's and UNIX clusters
• The ArcGIS toolbox GUI makes system calls to the command line executables to allow users to access the tools as standard ArcGIS toolbox tools
• Pre-compiled versions of TauDEM are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions
• UNIX makefiles are included in the source code for Unix users to compile the execuables for their systems

Acknowledgments

TauDEM software has been developed with support from the following. This support is greatly appreciated.

• US Army Corps of Engineers Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) for enhancement to use GDAL library.
• William Penn Foundation and Stroud Water Research Center for functionality in support of online watershed delineation and geographic coordinates.
• US Army Corps of Engineers System Wide Water Resources Program (SWWRP)for development of Version 5 with it's MPI parallel processing approach.
• National Science Foundation grant EAR-9318977 for the development of the D-Infinity approach.
• National Science Foundation grant INT-9724720 and NIWA New Zealand for the work on methods for mapping and identification of flow directions from digital elevation data during sabbatical at NIWA 1997-1998.
• Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory for work on the adaptation of these codes for use with the TMDL Toolkit, and integration of flow with existing channel networks.
• United States Geological Survey and Utah Water Research Laboratory, Source Water Protection project, for the development of specialized analysis functions for water quality analysis.
• Bob Pack for the development of the Reverse Accumulation function.
• Dan Ames, HydroMap consulting for the MapWindow port.
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, research assistantship under Rafael Bras, for my Sc.D. research where this all got started. While almost no actual code from this work still remains, the basic idea still persists.