Effect of differing DEM creation methods on the results from a hydrological model

It is known that digital elevation models (DEMs) can vary in quality depending on their method of creation. Six DEMs derived from digitised contours from the British Ordnance Survey were compared. The DEMs were used to run TOPMODEL for a small catchment in Devon. There were differences between the DEMs in the prediction of the catchment area and the spatial pattern of topographic index values, although these differences were reduced by smoothing the DEMs. Because runoff in the area is dominated by subsurface flow, many of the model predictions were not sensitive to differences between the DEMs. However, predictions of surface runoff differed by over 200%, and caused variations of up to 25% in the prediction of hourly flow values. The predicted spatial pattern of surface runoff was strongly affected by the presence of interpolation artefacts in the DEM, with completely unrealistic predictions in the case of the worst quality DEMs.