Populating Drainage Area for NHDFlowlines Using ArcHydro

[RichardStevens1]

We've been plugging away on a project here that involves using the NHDFlowlines with Hazus to generate good stream centerlines and populate them with the drainage area using a Lidar derived DEM and watershed boundary.

I decided to take a look at ArcHydro thinking that it may be a simpler process than with Hazus. I used the NHDLines and DEM and blew through the Terrain Processing without issue. I have a nice DrainageLine and now I need to get it to the point where I can assign the drainage area (Attribute Tools -> Populate Drainage Area for Drain Line).

I stepped into the Watershed Processing section and I assumed if I were to get through all of that I would be able to use the tool above to populate the drainage area. However, since I already have a watershed boundary is there an easier way to do this? Dropping points to delineate the watershed is too time intensive.

Is there are way to bypass the Watershed Processing or trim it down if I already have the Watershed boundary? All I want in the end is a DrainageLine that has the drainage area populated.

[ChristineDartiguenave]

The Drainage Area associated to a drainageline is the sum of the area of its associated catchment and adjointcatchment. So if you have these 3 feature classes you can go ahead and run the tool to populate the DrainageArea for the lines.

Christine Dartiguenave
Esri Water Resources Team

[RichardStevens1]

Christine,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. After a couple of weeks of learning ArcHydro I was able to get the problem solved. I modified one of the models in the ArcHydro toolbox to create the features you mentioned. Then all I had to do was run Populate DrainArea for Drainage Lines under Attribute Tools. I wasn't able that particular tool in the ArcHydro toolbox so I couldn't include it in the model.

Below is a screenshot of the modified model if anyone is interested. Because I have to run this on 82 counties I included the target locations as parameters/variables so it was easy to deploy. It runs pretty seamlessly. I've only had it crash a couple of times and I'm using 2GB+ LIDAR derived county DEMs.

Initially I kept getting the COM Return error, but after upgrading to 2.1 and ArcMap 10.2 it has been smooth sailing.

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