I have the opportunity to use lidar data to produce an inundation model for an area of wetland. I have looked at various scenarios but none really fit my purpose thus I am asking here.
The scenario is, that my area of wetland is permanently water logged at a certain height above sea level e.g 80 meters. Surrounding the wetland area are a number of man-made drainage channels which have been dug out by neighbouring farmers. My Job is to create inundation models to estimate the extent of inundation if one or all of these drainage channels were filled in.
I will not be taking into account soil drainage or precipitation or evaporation etc. I have lidar data with 0.5m resolution.
My initial thoughts were to :
1. use the ArcGIS "FILL" tool to fill in the imperfections of the DEM (this seems to be the standard first step)
2. Calculate the volume of water in the basin including the drainage channels at a certain height.
3. Close the drainage channels and recreate the dem.
4. Refill the basin by the amount calculated in the last step and see where the water goes. ( not sure which tools or process could do this accurately)
In effect, what I am doing is creating a dam...the only difference is, that I have a constant volume of water in the basin before the dam in built.
If my line of thinking is totally wrong, I would be grateful for some input, or tips on how to achieve a reasonable result.
