Channel network identification is an important practice in not only hydrologic analysis but also hydraulic computation. In this paper, a new algorithm, watershed merging, is proposed to automatically identify and extract channel networks. In the water‐merging algorithm, based on the fact that the sink cell of a dendritic watershed is either a depression cell or a flat cell, a macroscale approach is proposed to treat the depression and flat areas (DAFA) and determine the flow direction within those areas, where the conventional D8 slope calculation fails. The separated neighboring watersheds are merged together using information of neighboring watersheds instead of the D8 cells. This progressive merging process starts from small neighboring watershed to larger ones. The example and applications demonstrated that the proposed watershed‐merging algorithm is effective in resolving the DAFA problems and identifying channel networks.

中文翻译：

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分水岭合并：一种简单有效的渠道网络识别和提取算法

渠道网络识别不仅是水文分析而且是水力计算的重要实践。本文提出了一种新的算法，分水岭合并，以自动识别和提取渠道网络。在水合并算法中，基于树枝状流域的沉陷单元是凹陷单元或平坦单元这一事实，提出了一种宏观方法来处理凹陷和平坦区域（DAFA）并确定其中的流向传统D8斜率计算失败的区域。使用相邻流域的信息而不是D8单元将分离的相邻流域合并在一起。这种渐进的合并过程从相邻的小流域到较大的流域开始。