Rivwidth: AUTOMATIC RIVER WIDTH CALCULATION
North American River Width (NARWidth) Dataset, containing >7M river width and centerline measurements, available here.
Note: A new version of RivWidth (v0.4) has been uploaded as of May 7th, 2013. See the new Readme file to learn about changes that have been made since version 0.3. Because the new version now automatically calculates centerlines without any user input, version 0.3 will continue to be available.
This page presents relevant information on RivWidth, a software product developed in Exelis VIS IDL developed by Tamlin M. Pavelsky in the UNC Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences and Laurence C. Smith in the UCLA Department of Geography. RivWidth provides continuous measurements of river width extracted from binary masks of inundated area derived using remotely sensed imagery or another source. For more information, please see our 2008 paper in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters:
Pavelsky, T.M. and L. C. Smith , RivWidth: A Software Tool for the Calculation of River Widths from Remotely Sensed Imagery, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, v. 5 no. 1, January 2008.
For more detail, please see the readme files available on this page as well as the source code, which is commented. We also provide a test dataset encompassing a portion of the Ohio River.
RivWidth is copyrighted under the BSD Software License. You are welcome to copy and/or modify RivWidth so long as you retain the original copyright information. If you do use RivWidth, please send an e-mail to pavelsky@unc. edu so that we can keep tabs on who is using the software. Depending on how much time we have available, we are also often to provide limited technical support. If you need to derive widths for a particularly difficult or extensive set of rivers and you would like to have us perform the calculations, please contact us and we can discuss whether this would be feasible.