Introducing RiverProfileApp, a web application for near-global, exploratory, longitudinal river profile analysis

Abstract

River profile analysis has been used extensively in the earth sciences. Commonly, exploration of river profiles requires downloading and processing Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) for specific areas, which limits the scope of exploratory analysis. Presented here is a web application designed to analyze river profiles at 90m resolution at a near-global scale. The app allows users to quickly query downstream or upstream from selected points anywhere within ±60 degrees latitude, in order to interactively analyze corresponding river profiles. River profile analysis can be performed in both distance and χ space, where χ is a metric that is proportional to the presumed steady-state shape of the river profile. River locations are based on the HydroSHEDS 90m drainage direction grid, as well as custom computed D8 drainage direction and void-filled SRTM DEMs. RiverProfileApp is open source, and although currently it is designed as an exploratory tool, more functions can be easily added via community contributions and/or from existing toolsets. It is available from RiverProfileApp.github.io.

Keywords

• river profile analysis
• geomorphology
• big data
• science communication