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Watershed delination

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12-19-2013 03:03 PM
ErnestDankwah
Emerging Contributor
I am trying to delineate watershed for road culverts using the culverts as pour points. I have 3, 10 and 30 meter resolution DEMs
which I downloaded from national map viewer for my study area. I snapped the pour points to specified distances; 10m distance for
the 3m resolution DEM 20m distance for the 10m DEM, and 50m distance for the 30m resolution DEM.

Can someone please help me how to get a reasonable catchment for each culvert? I am interested mainly in the little catchments
that drain into a particular point(s). I have tried the usual ways of delineating watersheds; creating flow direction, flow accumulation and using the snapped points to generate to watershed using the watershed tool. My problem is some of the catchments are way toobig for just one culvert. Can someone please help me how I can do this? Thanks.
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ErnestDankwah
Emerging Contributor
This will help you by checking your assumption that the watershed coming out of the processing is too big. Maybe its not.

In the old days, watershed were delineated by hand using contour maps. A contour map of the area, however old, should be somewhat consistent with a modern day DEM. If I have a watershed that looks "wonky" I will use some other data source to check it against. Contours are a good start. The rules are that the watershed boundary must cross the contours perpendicularly. Flow direction is also perpendicular to the contours. If you have a GIS generated watershed, it should overlay on the contours (polylines or image) and the watershed boundary should cross the contours perpendicularly. If not, something is wrong. I suspect this is elementary to you. There are docs online that explain this.

I've attached an image of a recent project I did with the watershed boundaries plotted over Topographic basemap layer from ESRI.


Thank you very much for this I really appreciate it. Will keep you posted on things. Once again, thank you.
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