Can gdal_calc operate conditionally with values from two tifs

Question

I am trying to correct some water table .tifs (WT) to the ground level elevation (DEM) so that water levels are not incorrectly presented as above ground. I have looked at many similar questions and answers but it seems to me that the conditional capability of gdal_calc is limited to subbing in a static floating point number. I need it to use values from a DEM in the event that the water table is above ground. Pythonically, this would be

if (DEM - WT) > 0:
   output = WT
else:
   output = DEM

However, I can only seem to get gdal_calc to sub in a static floating point number, not a reference to a more dynamic .tif file where the value would depend on the grid location.

Is this possible with gdal? I have tried the following command line calls:

python "C:\Program Files\GDAL\gdal_calc.py" -A DEM.tif -B WT.tif --calc="B*((A-B)>0)" --outfile WT_belowGround.tif

This produces a .tif with values only where WT is below ground with No Data gaps where it is above ground. This is close to what I want but I want data coverage in all locations for producing contours.

python "C:\Program Files\GDAL\gdal_calc.py" -A DEM.tif -B WT.tif --calc="B*((A-B)>0)" --calc="A*((A-B)<0)" --outfile WT_aboveGround.tif

This produces a .tif with values only where WT is above ground with No Data gaps where it is below ground. Again, this is close to what I want but I want data coverage in all locations and it seems the second --calc call overwrites the first with No Data values.

Trying to combine both of these I have tried several things without the desired result. The most obvious thing to me is to assign the NoDataValue to the desired DEM.tif as is shown below.

python "C:\Program Files\GDAL\gdal_calc.py" -A DEM.tif -B WT.tif --calc="B*((A-B)>0)" NoDataValue=DEM.tif --outfile diff.tif

While this runs and produces a .tif file, it gives an error and again, it produces a .tif with values only where WT is below ground with No Data gaps where it is above ground. The error is below

RuntimeWarning: invalid value encountered in greater

Is this something that gdal can do or do I need to find another way to approach this? One thought I have is to produce the two .tif files of WT above ground and below ground and combine them but I am not sure how to combine them either.

Answer 1

In addition to expressions you can use numpy functions in gdal_calc. Sounds like you might be looking for np.where().

Something like:

--calc="where((A-B)>0), A, B)"