Welcome to Xsection documentation!

Xsection is a Python-written script for creating cross sectional river profiles, normally used in 1D hydraulic modelling.

River cross section generation and chainaging made easy!

The program features:

• vertex sampling of 2D shapefiles to pick their elevation values from underyling Digital Elevation Models (DEM)

• parsing 3D terrestrial surveying 3D points into profiles

• automatic setting of river direction and cross section orientation (no need for careful manual creation anymore!)

• automatic calculation of the profile chainages according to the desired incrementation (upstream or downstream)

• conversion of the results into ASCII version of the XNS11 geometry file from Mike11 by DHI software.

• different profile creation options:

  1. auto-generated profiles (based on DEM and input parameters)
  2. profiles from 2D Line Shapefile and DEM
  3. profiles from a 3D geodetic suverying points in Shapefile

Program is heavily inspired by DHI’s proprietary plugin, called Mike 11 GIS, and a QGIS plugin for HEC-RAS, RiverGIS.

Note

Xsection is only available as a command line script with a file-based input specification, so in order to properly modify and visualize input and output geospatial data, it is mandatory to work with a decent GIS software. I strongly suggest installing QGIS as it is a very intuitive open-source alternative to proprietary GIS tools.

The following documentation will get you through the installation process and program usage.

Contents:

• Installation
• Overview of the key elements
  • Rivers
  • Digital Elevation Model (DEM)
  • Embankments
  • Cross sections
• Profile generation methods
  • AUTO
  • LINES
  • MEASUREMENTS
• Program results
• Working with Xsection
• Demo with sample data
• About
  • About the project
  • About the author
  • Licence