Whanganui District Council utilized the Whitebox Hydrological Modelling Tools in QGIS to create Overland Flow Paths and Ground Depression Areas from our 2021 LiDAR datasets. The talk will also describe how we style the layers in QGIS and an analysis use case for the datasets produced.
Hydrological modelling can be performed in QGIS using WhiteboxTools, which is a powerful open-source geospatial data analysis and processing platform. WhiteboxTools provides a set of hydrological analysis tools that can be used for modeling stream networks, watersheds, flow accumulation, and other hydrological variables. For Whanganui District Council, Overland flow paths are a common way of representing the predicted path of stormwater as it flows over the topography and we use depression areas to map the potential extent of stormwater ponding if the stormwater network is full or failure occurs within the network. By combining Whitebox Tools with QGIS, Whanganui District Council was able to perform in-house complex hydrological modeling tasks using open-source software, which helped save time and money while improving the accuracy and reliability of our analysis.
Speakers: Simon Nitz