Technical Note: Automatic river network generation for a physically-based river catchment model

Abstract. SHETRAN is a physically-based distributed modelling system that gives detailed simulations in time and space of water flow and sediment and solute transport in river catchments. Standard algorithms for the automatic generation of river channel networks from digital elevation data are impossible to apply in SHETRAN and other similar models because the river channels are assumed to run along the edges of grid cells. In this work a new algorithm for the automatic generation of a river channel network in SHETRAN is described and its use in an example catchment demonstrated.