I need to calculate(estimate) hydraulic head(elevation drop) along a single river stream in order to find potential site for small hydropower plant.
I have a DEM with 20m resolution and raster and vector format of the stream.
Can anybody help me how can I do that with ArcGIS tools or in some other way?
If you have ArcGIS 10 and the 3D Analyst, you could use the "Add Surface Information Tool". It populates the attribute table of the Polyline Feature Class/Shapefile with basic elevation and slope statistics.
you can use the Interpolate Shape tool to interpolate the Z values into the streams.
Once you have all the z-aware feature class, you can then add 4 fields, one for x, one for Y & one for the Z coordinate. Use calculate Geometry to populate these values.
You can get the Z values that way. You can even graph these values, so as to get a visual profile. For this, I would suggest that you add one more field called distance, and populate it using the field calculator as (X^2 +Y^2)^0.5. You can plot Z values v/s Distance to get a nice looking profile.
Stack Profile
Creates a table and optional graph denoting the profile of line features over one or more multipatch, raster, TIN, or terrain surfaces (ArcGIS Help, 2015).
