Arc Hydro DEM Culvert Burning

[KevinSchmidt1]

Hello, I have two sets of data I would like to work with in Arc Hydro. It is important to burn the culverts into the DEM, otherwise, the roads will act as dams.

• A Digitial Elevation Model (DEM) generated from high-resolution LiDAR
• Feature Class Polyline layer containing surveyed culverts

I was looking at using the Build Walls tool in Arc Hydro to burn the culverts into the DEM using the Input Breach Line Raster. However, this requires the culverts to be in raster format and currently they are a feature class layer. Similar issues in using the DEM Reconditioning tool, it requires the input to be in raster format.

Is there a tool to convert my Feature Class Polyline culverts to raster format or is there a tool/workflow in Arc Hydro which I can input the culverts as a Feature Class Polyline to burn them into the DEM and create a Hydro Conditioned DEM (I think this is often referred to an an AGREE DEM)?

[JayantaPoddar]

Hope the polyline has an elevation field. You can execute Polyline to Raster using the "Elevation Field" as the Value Field.

[KevinSchmidt1]

They do not currently, but that is something I can add thanks for the help! 

Do you know of a tool that can read the minimum elevation along the polyline from the DEM and apply that value to a value field on the culvert Polyline Feature Class?

[JayantaPoddar]

*In case it's a single value for the whole Feature Class,

You could use Extract by Mask, the result would be a raster (along the lines). You could use the lowest value of the raster to Calculate the field.

[JayantaPoddar]

In case you want each record of the culvert feature class to take the minimum value from DEM individually, you could use Zonal Statistics as Table .

You can then Join the field with the Culvert Feature Class based on ObjectID or any other suitable ID field.

[KevinSchmidt1]

See the image attached, that extract by mask tool worked great. Is there now a way to calculate the minimum value along that raster and apply it to the elevation field for each of the culverts on the layer? I can do it manually it is just time-consuming. There are 175 culverts on this layer, so anyway I can lean up the process would be useful.

[JayantaPoddar]

Do you want to put same value for all 175 culverts? Use Calculate Field.

Looks like lowest value of DEM along the culvert layer is 596.3. So,

Expression:

596.3

[MB_Hydrology]

I have used Dendritic Terrain Processing with Imposed Drainage line and wall; you can look at it in the model builder  to find out the exact gp tool they used for hydro conditioning. 

I also use acpf : https://acpf4watersheds.org/toolbox/

With my very limited experience with archydro, I found acpf much faster. For your purpose, you can use the manual cutter and dam builder tool in acpf; it will take feature class as input

[KevinSchmidt1 · Accepted solution]

To summarize the solution my workflow is as follows:

• Trace culverts as polylines from surveyed points.
• Zonal Statistics tool statistics type minimum value (input raster or feature zone data is culvert polyline layer; input value raster is the DEM).
• Mosaic to New Raster tool using the output from Zonal Statistics Tool as the first input raster; the DEM as the second input raster; 32-bit float which matches my DEM; Mosaic Operator first.

The output is a DEM with the culverts burnt in using the minimum LiDAR values along that line.

[_Drew_]

Hi Kevin,

Would you be willing to show how you did this on a screenshare? 

Thank you for considering - 

Andrew Lloyd - alloyd@mercercounty.org