Large Scale River Network Routing Using RAPID

Ahmad Tavakoly

Introduction
Rivers play an important role in the Earth’s hydrological cycle (Figure 1), and
most climate system models nowadays include continental scale river
transport models (RTMs) to complete the global water balance. In the
continental scale Water on land regulates heating and moistening of the
atmosphere and directly has effect on Earth`s climate. Here in the US,
several databases for river network are accessible and we can easily get
data for all large river basins.

Figure 1: Hydrological cycle

as represented in most earth system models (Ref. Larson et al, 2007).

One of the best sites is NHD1 Plus. This data base first released in 2006 and it
has some water components data including: catchment characteristic, flow
volume, velocity, and etc. in this web site the nation divided to 21 hydrology
regions and just by click on the map for desired region all data for that
region are available. Figure (2) shows region 12 based on this data set.

1 National hydrography dataset

 Figure 2: Texas gulf (hydrologic region 12, ref. NHD Plus website)

Land surface model (LSMs) developed by atmosphere scientists for

atmospheric model with boundary conditions (water and energy balance).
River routing models in the LSMs have been classically used gridded river
networks that best fit the computational domain used in LSMs (David et al.
2009).

Today geographic information system (GIS) database can be used. Cedric

David developed a river routing model for large-scale applications called:
RAPID (Routing Application for Parallel computation of Discharge) to
calculate discharge using Muskingum routing scheme. This model can be
used for any river network using input data at the upstream and downstream
of each river reach.

My dissertation is about parallelization of St. Venant equation for a large

river network. Using the GIS one can show the movement of water volume
along a river direction. The purpose of my GIS project is to learn how the
RAPID model works and try to run it for Texas Gulf (hydrologic region 12) or a
new network. As we can see in the figure 1, the region 12 is also divided into
production units: 12 a, b, c, d, e, and f. in addition, I intend to animate a map
with time based on RAPID flow calculations.
Rapid Model
To analyze flow variables, such as the flow depth and velocity or the flow
depth and the rate of discharge, the continuity equation and the momentum
or energy equation are used. However in some cases some terms of the
governing equations are smaller than the other terms. These analysis
procedures called approximate methods. For instance, if continuity equation
solved simultaneously with a simplified form of momentum equation is called
hydrologic routing. Rapid model is developed for NHDPlus river network and
it can be use for parallel computing. This model uses the Muskingum method
for channel routing. The backbone of RAPID is a vector-matrix version of the
Muskingum method (David et al. 2009):

∴∗
( I − C1.N ) .Q (t + ∆ t )= C1 .Q (t +)
e
C2 N .Q t(+ ) Q t( +) C3 .Q t (
e
)
ΜΕ Ρ Γ Ε Φ Ο Ρ Μ Α Τ 0

Where: t is time and Δt is the river routing time step. I is the identify matrix.
N is the river network matrix. C1, C2 and C3 are parameter diagonal matrices
and for a given reach j, they can represent as [Birkhad and James, 2002]:

\*
K j X j − 0.5∆t
C1 j =
K j ( 1 − X j ) + 0.5∆t
K j X j + 0.5∆t
C2 j =
K j ( 1 − X j ) + 0.5∆t
K j ( 1 − X j ) − 0.5∆t
C3 j =
K j ( 1 − X j ) + 0.5∆t
MERGEFORMAT0

Kj is storage constant (with dimension of a time) and Xj is a dimensionless

weighting factor. Q is a vector of outflows from each reach, and Qe is a vector
of lateral inflows for each reach. Lateral inflow in this model is calculated by
land surface model.

Parameter estimation
Parameters K and X need to be determine in the RAPID model. For this
purpose, an inverse method is used. This method optimizes the parameters
so that out puts match with the observed data. Fread, (1993) said that X is
between 0.1 and 0.3 in most streams. The Muskingum K parameter is
estimated from Eq. (3) as follows (Fread, 1993, Tewolde and Smithers,
2006):
\*
Lj
Kj =
Vwj
MERGEFORMAT0
Where: Kj = storage constant, Lj = reach length, Vwj = wave celerity.

The USGS IDA (http://ida.water.usgs.gov/ida/) provides 15- minutes flow

measurements that can be used to determine wave celerity. For the San
Antonio and Guadalupe basins data at fourteen gaging stations are obtained
from IDA. Cross correlation values for each pair of stations were calculated.
The maximum correlation and corresponding time lag for any of the two
stations are calculated used to determine the flow wave celerity. More
information about how to determine wave celerity is online available at:
(https://webspace.utexas.edu/aat669/report.mht?uniq=5bqctw&xythos-
download). The celerity used here in the model simulation for Region 12 is
uniformly 2.5 m/s.

To avoid estimating (Kj and Xj) for all reaches, RAPID model optimizes two
multiplying factors and using following equations:
λk λx

, \* MERGEFORMAT0
Lj x j = λx ⋅ 0.1
K j = λk .
Vwj

At the end of the optimize procedure, a couple of ( , ) is determined for a

λk λx
given basin in the network.

Rapid Model Applications

In this study first we try to run RAPID model for Guadalupe and San Antonio
River Basins (Figure 3). NHDPlus database provides the mapped streams and
rivers as well as the catchments that surround them in the United States. On
this database river reach in the national network is assigned a unique integer
identifier called COMID. NHDPlus catchments also have a COMID, the same
COMID being used for the reach and its local contributing catchment. From
the attribute table of NHD flowlines feature, the Guadalupe and San Antonio
river basins have a total 5175 reaches. These reaches have an average
length of 3.00 Km and average catchment size area around them is 5.11
Km2. River network and sample reach with its catchment shown in the figure
4.

San Antonio and Guadalupe Basins

µ
Legend
Texas
Basin

0 55 110 220 330 440

Kilometers
 Figure 3: Guadalupe and San Antonio basins

To run RAPID model, runoff is required and it is calculated by a land surface

model called Community Noah Land Surface Model with Multi-Physics Option
Noah-MP [Niu, et al., 2009]. The runoff is provided on a grid (several netCDF
files, thousands of them, one for each time step of the study). This grid
needs to be converted to something readable by RAPID. David do that using
a "flux coupler". That's basically a program that accumulates the runoff from
the land surface and dumps it to the corresponding river reach.

µ
Legend
0 10 20 40 60 80
NHDPlus reaches Kilometers
NHDPlus catchments
Figu re
4: NHDPlus river network and catchment for the Guadalupe and San Antonio Basins
The model is used to calculate river flow in all 5175 river reaches of the
Guadalupe and San Antonio River Basins for four years (01 January 2004 – 31
December 2007). Output of the model include: volume and flow. Rapid
calculates variables every three hours. The first set of values that are in the
output file correspond to an average of the first three hours (between 00:00
and 03:00). The second set of values corresponds to between 03:00 and
06:00. To take daily average of model output, David developed program
called “process_model_flow_map_for_Arc.f90”, in this program IS_M is a
number of days. In this code, IS_M is multiplied by 8. 8 is the number of time
steps per day (8 x 3 = 24 hours per day). Therefore, if we put IS_M=105,
what the program (process_model_flow_map_for_Arc.f90) gives us is the
average outflows of the 105th day (from 00:00 hours to 23:59 hours).
This model also used for the hydrology region 12. This region includes 74615
reaches (figure 5).

Base map of Region12

µ
0 55 110 220 330 440
Kilometers

Legend
USGS Gages
Subbasin

Figure 5: hydrology Region 12

Results

Each river named by COMID in the Rapid model and we can get the time
series for every COMID which represents upstream river reach. From the
model output, computed flow rate are compared with the daily data. Four
stations in the San Antonio and Guadalupe river basins are selected. Figures
6 shows selected gages in these basins. As we can see two of these stations
are on the main river San Antonio and Guadalupe Rivers and the others have
smaller upstream basins.

SanGuad Basins with selected gages to compare reults

Guadalupe Rv nr Spring Branch, TX

b

µ
Legend
b
San Antonio Rv nr Falls City, TX

Guadalupe Rv at Victoria, TX
b
b selectedgages San Antonio Rv at Goliad, TX
b
SanGuadFlowline
0 12.5 25 50 75 100
SanGuadBasins Kilometers
 Figure 6: location of selected stations for comparison of result.

Once the run is done, model results are compared with the observed data.
Figures 7-10 show hydrographs of flow routing.

Figures 7: Hydrograph of observed and computed flow for the Guadalupe River at
Victoria
Figures 8: Hydrograph of observed and computed flow for the Guadalupe Rv nr
Spring Branch, TX

Figures 9: Hydrograph of observed and computed flow for the San Antonio Rv at
Goliad, TX
 Figures 10: Hydrograph of observed and computed flow for the San Antonio Rv nr
Falls City, TX

Based on the above figures, it seems that results for gages on the main
rivers going dawn along a stream have more accuracy comparing with gages
on the small rivers. It is very difficult to comment on why downstream would
be better than upstream. One of the potential reasons is that the land
surface model that was used to create the input data for RAPID is calibrated
using downstream gages. Other than that, it all due to the land surface
model calculations: runoff scheme, land cover, vegetation scheme. Overall
those results are very satisfactory.

From the RAPID output we can also see a variation of flow over basins.
Figures 11 and 12 show flow out of all reaches for San Antonio Guadalupe
and Region 12 Basins respectively. Both figures represent flow routing over
basins on 20 April 2004.
 Flow caluculated by Rapid model for SanGuad Basins

Legend

Qout
µ
NHDFlowline_San_Guad_with_dir

0.000000 - 0.448000
0.448001 - 1.510000
1.510001 - 3.070000
3.070001 - 4.950000
4.950001 - 7.940000
7.940001 - 14.500000
14.500001 - 25.700000
25.700001 - 45.300000
45.300001 - 68.900000
68.900001 - 168.000000
streamgage_San_Guad_gotQ_spa_join_2004_2007_full

0 10 20 40 60 80
Kilometers

Figures 11:
Flow rate calculated for all reaches by model for San Antonio and Guadalupe Basins
 Figures 11: Flow rate calculated for all reaches by model for San Antonio and
Guadalupe Basins

Scalability of parallel computation

In this project the model is set up for San Antonio and Guadalupe river
network with 5,175 rivers and Region 12 with 74,615 reaches. The river
network of the NHDPlus data set has about 3 million reaches for the United
States. To simultaneously compute flow and volume of river in all reaches for
such a large problem, parallel computing is needed. RAPID can be applied on
several processors. In order to assess scalability of the river network model,
the model is run on the Lonestar supercomputer
(http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/resources/hpcsystems/#lonestar) for Region 12. Figure 12
shows performance of the model using different number of processors. In
this figure two computing times are given: the wall-clock time is the time
between the start and the end time of the all computations for the last
processor. The red plot in Fig. 12 is the simulation time difference, when
adding one more processor. For example the red plot at number of
processor=1 represents the simulation time difference when using two
processor and one processor. Fig. 12 shows that simulation time decreases
significantly with increasing number of processors up to 5. An increase
beyond 5 processors results in small decrease in simulation time.

Figures 12: Scalability of RAPID computations

Conclusion

Table 1 shows the root mean square error (RMSE) of computed flow rate for
the selected gages. As this table shows the model results are satisfactory.

Table 1: RMSE for the selected gaging stations

Guadalupe Guadalup San Antonio
e Rv nr San Antonio
River at Rv nr Falls
Spring Rv at Goliad,
Victoria Branch, City, TX TX
TX
RMSE 75.08 45. 49 36.78 44.05

In this project, the scalability of RAPID model for parallel computing is also
investigated for region 12. Fig. 12 shows scalability for the simulation
considered.
Acknowledgement

The RAPID model developed by Cedric David (2009). I would like to

acknowledge him for sharing source code and his help to run model.

References:
A.L. Birkhead, C.S. James, Muskingum river routing with dynamic bank storage,
Journal of Hydrology 264 (2002) 113–132.
David, C. H, D. R. Maidment, G.-Y. Niu, Z.-L. Yang and F. Habets., “River
network routing in the Guadalupe and San Antonio River Basins”, submitted to
Water Resources Research on Sept 25 2009.
Fread, D. L. (1993), Flow Routing, in Handbook of Hydrology, edited by D. R.
Maidment, pp. 10.17-10.18, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Larson., J. W., A. P. Craig, J. B. Drake, D. J. Erickson, M. L. Branaetter, M.
W. Ham, “A Massively Parallel Dynamical Core for Continental- to Global-Scale
River Transport”, 2007.
Niu, G. Y., et al. (2009), The Community Noah Land Surface Model with Multi-
Physics Options, Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, (submitted).
Tewolde and JC Smithers, Flood routing in ungauged catchments using
Muskingum methods, Water SA Vol.32 (3) 2006: pp.379-388.