Abstract
Recently, a variety of GIS-based tools enabling to generate topographic parameters for hydrologic and hydraulic researches have been developed. However, most of GIS-based tools are usually insufficient to estimate and visualize river channel slopes especially along the river network, which can be possibly utilized for many hydraulic equations such as Manning's formula. Many existing GIS-based tools have simply averaged cell-based slopes for the other advanced level of hydrologic units as likely as the mean watershed slope, thus that the river channel slope from the simple approach resulted in the inaccurate channel slope particularly for the mountain region where the slope varies significantly along the downstream direction. The paper aims to provide several more advanced GIS-based methodologies to assess the river channel slopes along the given river network. The developed algorithms were integrated with a newly developed tool named RiverSlope, which adapted theoretical formulas of river hydraulics to calculate channel slopes. For the study area, Han stream in the Jeju island was selected, where the channel slopes have a tendency to rapidly change the upstream near the Halla mountain and sustain the mild slope adjacent to watershed outlet heading for the ocean. The paper compared the simple slope method from the Arc Hydro, with other more complicated methods. The results are discussed to decide better approaches based on the given conditions.
