Colored longitudinal river profiles

Did you ever face the problem that you wanted to plot additional variables together with the two spatial dimensions of a river profile. One such variable could be ksn values, or gradient, or lithological identifiers. I recently had this problem, then coded a solution, and now uploaded an updated version of STREAMobj/plotdz.

Such additional variables must be available as so-called node-attributed lists (nal). These lists are column vectors that have as many elements as there are nodes in the stream network. A STREAMobj S has a couple of such nal as properties, e.g. S.x, S.y or S.IXgrid. S.x and S.y are coordinate vectors that locate each node in a projected coordinate system. S.IXgrid is a vector of linear indices into the DEM from which S was derived. nal are returned by a number of STREAMobj methods such as STREAMobj/gradient, STREAMobj/streamorder, STREAMobj/curvature, and STREAMobj/chitransform, among others. Alternatively, you can derive a nal using getnal. For example, a nal with elevation values is simply obtained by

z = getnal(S,DEM);

Now how can you plot colored river profiles. Line objects as produced by the function plot do not support gradually varying colors. As far as I know, there are three work-arounds. The first approach is to plot each line segment with variable colors using the low-level function line. This, however, would probably take ages for large stream networks with thousands of individual line segments. The second approach is to plot the line as a surface with colored edges. This old-time-hack works quite well and leaves you with all the options that surface objects offer. The third approach is one that I came across when reading through Yair Altman’s undocumented MATLAB blog. He reports on some undocumented line properties that were introduced with MATLAB’s new graphics engine in R2014b. I implemented the surface approach and the undocumented approach and let you choose.

Ok, now let’s see the updated plotdz-function in action:

load exampleDEM
DEM = GRIDobj(X,Y,dem);
FD = FLOWobj(DEM,'preprocess','carve');
A = flowacc(FD);
S = STREAMobj(FD,A>100);
S = klargestconncomps(S);
z = imposemin(S,DEM);
s = streamorder(S);
subplot(2,1,1)
plotdz(S,DEM,'color',s,'LineWidth',1,'cbarlabel','Stream order')

g = gradient(S,z);
c = chitransform(S,A,'mn',0.45);
subplot(2,1,2)
plotdz(S,DEM,'color',g,'LineWidth',1,'distance',c,'cbarlabel','Gradient [m/m]')
xlabel('\chi [m]')

Colored longitudinal river profiles using STREAMobj/plotdz

Now that looks quite ok. Also note the option to modify the values of the upstream distance that allows you to easily plot Χ-plots without using the function chiplot.

Hope that functions turns out to be useful for you.