Pyflowline: a mesh-independent river network generator for hydrologic models
Published in The Journal of Open Source Software, 2023
River networks are crucial in hydrologic and Earth system models. Accurately representing river networks in hydrologic models requires considering the model spatial resolution and computational mesh. However, current river network representation methods often have several limitations: (1) vector-based; (2) they perform poorly at coarse resolution (3) they do not support unstructured meshes. To overcome these limitations, we developed PyFlowline, a Python package that generates mesh-independent river networks. With PyFlowline, hydrologic modelers can generate conceptual river networks at various spatial resolutions for both structured and unstructured computational meshes. The generated river network datasets can be used by hydrologic models across scales.
Recommended citation: Liao et al., (2023). pyflowline: a mesh-independent river network generator for hydrologic models. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(91), 5446, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05446 http://changliao.github.io/files/2023/pyflowline_joss.pdf