ArcGIS merge polygons (catchments)

Question

I have a shape with 113 polygons. (partial catchment in hydrometric station sections). Is there any method, in ArcGIS, to overlap and merge polygons from upstream to downstream, in order to results a shape with 113 polygons not partial (between stations) but total (every partial catchment from downstream to be merged with the one upstream and so on....)

Below I selected a few partial catchments, as an example

Answer 1

Yes, here are some general steps:

1. Add all possible hydrometric station names that you want to merge together into a list object (you could have a list of lists if there are multiple different station names you want to merge together)
2. Use for loop to loop over hydrometric station name list and within loop use arcpy Select method to select and export out feature(s) to new layer based on sql query composed from the list values.

Answer 2

Ok, I see you have multiple disconnected stream networks. I do have scripts to handle situations like that, but that's too many to post and I am not prepared to do so. This is why I suggest:

• create geometric network from your streams
• create relationship class between stream nodes and subcatchments. I hope there is 1:1 related fields, i.e. node name somehow coded in subcatchment name.
• shuffle through your hydrometric stations (perhaps use data driven pages) and select all incoming streams
• trace upstream and select nodes that intersect selected streams.
• open table of records, click related tables
• dissolve selected to separate feature class

Sorry to tell, but without scripting you'll need to repeat it 113 times, before merging outputs together.

Invest time to scripting ...

Answer 3

Thanks @FelixIP. I see there are enough steps to do and I understand that witout automation it’s a lot of work. Unfortunely, I’m quite new with python, but even so, I’ve use a trace downstream code from an older reply of yours regarding cumulative polygon basin calculation and resulted total surfaces at hydrometric station (BH is partial basin, BH_DS is downstream basin, AREA_BH is partial surface and AREA_TOT is total surface of basin). I guess I could use some parts of this code and add a mergeList = [ ] in which to merge polygons with arcpy.Merge_management and then to dissolve them with arcpy.Dissolve_management and save to disk...but I’m prety stuck.

import arcpy
mxd = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument("CURRENT")
bh = arcpy.mapping.ListLayers(mxd)[0]
table = arcpy.da.TableToNumPyArray("bh", ("BH", "AREA_BH", "BH_DS"))
nod = {}; total = {}
for id, load, dsNode in table:
    nod[id] = [dsNode.rstrip(), load]
    total[id] = load

for id, x in nod.iteritems():
    fromNode = id; load = x[1]
    while True:
       dsNode = nod[fromNode][0]
       if dsNode =="": break
       total[dsNode] += load
       fromNode = dsNode

with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor("bh", ("BH", "AREA_TOT")) as cursor:
    for id, sum in cursor:
        sum = total[id]
        cursor.updateRow((id, sum))
del mxd