IPH-Hydro Tools

SIQUEIRA, V. A. ; FLEISCHMANN, A. S. ; JARDIM, P. F. ; FAN, F. M. ; COLLISCHONN, W. . IPH-Hydro Tools: a GIS coupled tool for watershed topology aquisition in open-source environment. Revista Brasileira de Recursos Hídricos, v. 21, p. 274-287, 2016.

This page presents a brief description of IPH-Hydro Tools package and provides downloads of the plugin and application manuals.

IPH-Hydro Tools is a toolkit that works as a plugin of the MapWindow GIS and the Quantum GIS free softwares. It allows the user to extract attributes such as drainage line and catchments from digital elevation models. It works with raster files in the ASCII format with sizes of around 250,000,000 cells. This number is enough, for instance, to process the whole São Francisco River catchment with a 90 m x 90 m raster. Output files can be either raster or vectorial files.

Then, IPH-Hydro Tools was created to process large watersheds, in addition of generating drainage lines more correct due to the available depression removal methods – HS (Heuristic Search), PFS (Priority First Search) e MHS (Modified Heuristic Search). The figure below compares the results obtained for the drainage network of Iquiri River, a tributary of Ituxi River in the Amazon Basin, with two methods, IPH-Hydro Tools MHS and ArcGIS® ArcHydro.

Finally, the toolkit has been enhanced to be utilised in the MGB-IPH model pre-processing steps, with tools such as the Hydrological Response Units generator.

Installing IPH-Hydro Tools Plugin

IPH-Hydro Tools works as a plugin of the free GIS softwares MapWindow GIS and Quantum GIS and must be incorporated to the softwares when it is already installed. In the item downloads of this page it is provided a 64 bits version of the toolkit, allowing the user to work with large raster files. Then, it is necessary to have the 64 bits MapWindow version (available here) or the Quantum GIS platform (available here).

Incorporation with MapWindow GIS

After downloading the plugin in the link below, unzip the folder “IPH-Hydro Tools” in MapWindow plugins directory (it is probably “C:/Program Files/MapWindow/Plugins”). Finally, enable the toolkit in the MapWindow interface, in the “Plugins” menu.

Incorporation with Quantum GIS

After downloading the plugin in the link below, unzip the folder “IPH-Hydro Tools” in Quantum GIS plugins directory (it is probably “C:/Users/User/.qgis/Python”). Finally, enable the toolkit in the Quantum GIS interface, in the menu.

Input data

The only necessary file to start the IPH-Hydro Tools utilities is a Digital Elevation Model in ASCII format. SRTM 90 m DEMs can be obtained in this link.

The following table presents the existing tools in the program:

To understand more about how utilise the program we suggest the user to download the manual available at this page.

Available material for download

Plugins:

MapWindow GIS version: IPH-Hydro Tools

Quantum GIS version: IPH-Hydro Tools

Manuals:

IPH-Hydro Tools manual with study case in the Uruguay River catchment (coming…)

Example of input and output files

Example files

Contact

Vinícius Siqueira