TWI results comparison from USGS 3DEP DEM getter ArcGIS tool vs ESRI Living Atlas Terrain DEM
Hello, ESRI water resources team, so which of the following two seems to have better quality? I am more inclined towards the TWI derived from the Terrain DEM as it looks more smooth and less pixelated.
From Terrain DEM
From USGS 3DEP DEM Getter ArcGIS Pro tool
Top:
TWI raster generated using Model Builder. The model iterates through a geodatabase of individual HUC12 boundary feature classes, using the boundaries as a mask to extract the Terrain imagery layer from the Living Atlas using the Extract By Mask tool, then resamples the resulting extracted raster to 3-meter resolution, smoothes the raster using the ArcHydro Smooth High Resolution DEM tool, then finally generating the TWI raster
Bottom:
TWI raster generated by a Python Script that goes through the same workflow as the model, but with some added steps (generating surface water rasters for DTW inputs). The difference is that the Python script was using a DEM obtained using the DEM Getter toolbox, which downloads DEMs from the USGS by bounding box at 1-meter resolution. No other inputs for any of the other tools mentioned were changed, only the DEM is different between the script and the model.
