Effect of Topographic Data Accuracy on Watershed Management

A digital elevation model (DEM) is a digital model or 3D representation of a terrain’s surface. There are many methods to create DEM such as LiDAR, stereo photogrammetry and topographic maps. DEMs are very important for many applications such as extracting terrain parameters for geomorphology and modeling water flow for hydrology or mass movement. A number of websites are available to provide DEM such as SRTM, GTOPO30 and ASTER GDEM but their accuracy differs from one to another and also selecting a small DEM size (high resolution) gives accurate information, but the analysis takes long time. This paper aims to analyze the impact of using different available DEMs on watershed geomorphological properties on order to provide guidelines for users to select the most suitable DEM that obtain an accurate analysis in less time. Three programs; watershed modeling systems: WMS, Global Mapper and Google Earth were used in this study. Three case studies were studied to check the accuracy of these models and select the most accurate one for application. Satellite images downloaded from Google Earth were used as a guide reference for the comparison due to their accuracy and high resolution. The results indicated that the SRTM model was more accurate (95%) for all case studies according to our comparison between its delineation and satellite images. ASTER GDEM is the second most accurate model with an accuracy of 87%, the GTOPO30’s accuracy is 80%.