How to create river centerline and river bank from DEM

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01-20-2013 03:47 PM
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AmirJavaheri
New Contributor II
Hi,

I am working with ArcMap10 and HecGeoRas10. I want to export data from GIS to hec-ras. I read a tutorial and understood how to do this, but I have a problem. How can I determine the centerline and river banks accurately? Of course by using elevation maps and tools in HecGeoRas it's not possible to determine the exact centerline and banks!

One method is to import data in Hec-Ras and change the data for river banks there, but for my case it's not possible to check all the cross sections! Because I'm working on a long river and I have a lot of cross sections.

Thank yo very much if you could help me.
Amir
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MattMead
New Contributor III
Amir,
The centerline is only used to calculate the channel downstream distance (when used as the flowpath line) and minor variations in this length will have little impact in the calculated water surface elevations.  As long as your centerline is not weaving back and forth adding extra distance, just do your best and get as close to the center as possible.

As for your bank stations, you will almost always have modify these in HEC-RAS.  You could adjust the symbology of your DEM so that it is easier to pick up the break point between the channel and the overbanks and set your bank line to there, but honestly you would probably end up spending more time doing that then using the graphical cross section editor to manually edit the section.  I've done 23miles (200ish XS) in about 10 minutes, so it not too bad in the graphical editor. 

If you dont want to do that, a less accurate method would be to determine if your river has a consistent width and then you can just copy parallel the stream centerline.  My company does this just so our initial stations are in the general area before we manually modify them.

Really though, you are going to be checking each cross section to make sure you have all your ineffective areas/blocked obstructions/no critical depths without reason/etc so you might as well just set the banks too.  Like I said, its quick in the graphical editor and will save you headaches in the long run.
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ThomasDilts
Occasional Contributor III
Amir,

I've got a tool that will generate centerlines from a polygon :

http://resources.arcgis.com/gallery/file/geoprocessing/details?entryID=EF0C96FF-1422-2418-7F9F-B0A88...

It runs in ArcGIS 10.0 and isn't perfect (e.g. you lose some centerline near the ends of the polylines) but generally it works alright if you're willing to do some small follow-up editing.

-Tom Dilts
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