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I need to calculate(estimate) hydraulic head(elevation drop) along a single river stream in order to find potential site for small hydropower plant. I have a DEM with 20m resolution and raster and vector format of the stream. Can anybody help me how can I do that with ArcGIS tools or in some other way? Thanks in advance. Subija.

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2 Answers

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If you have ArcGIS 10 and the 3D Analyst, you could use the "Add Surface Information Tool". It populates the attribute table of the Polyline Feature Class/Shapefile with basic elevation and slope statistics.

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you can use the Interpolate Shape tool to interpolate the Z values into the streams.

Once you have all the z-aware feature class, you can then add 4 fields, one for x, one for Y & one for the Z coordinate. Use calculate Geometry to populate these values.

You can get the Z values that way. You can even graph these values, so as to get a visual profile. For this, I would suggest that you add one more field called distance, and populate it using the field calculator as (X^2 +Y^2)^0.5. You can plot Z values v/s Distance to get a nice looking profile.

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Thaks a lot.I supose that I must take the stream layer in shape format and use Interpolate shape tool with DEM raster as input layer.Can you help me with step-by-step procedure descriptison in deatail please.How to use Calculate Geometry to populate x,y and z values of river stream in shp format? You can send me explanation with attachment in word or pdf format. Thank you in advance Mr. Devdatta. – Subija Izeiroski Oct 22 '11 at 22:09
Devdatta Tengshe. Can You send me the workflow (step by step) how can I get the Z values with ading a field in attribute table and using calculate geometry of field calculator? namely with the activating of calculate geometry there is not option to calculate Z values directly. May be I should use field calculator to get elevation values of z-aware feature class, or with use of some script using advanced options in field calculator. I still have no idea how to get Zvalues of stream feature class. For your help thank in advance. I am waiting for quick answer. – user5559 Jan 19 '12 at 22:39
@SubijaIzeiroski Do you have ArcGIS 10, or Arcgis 9.3? – Devdatta Tengshe Jan 22 '12 at 2:51

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