Water yield, transform water volume values

NatCap Software Support
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Hello, I am working with the water yield model, I have the results but I want to transform the data, I would like to show the data in cubic meters per hectare, and I also want to obtain the flow, that is, how many cubic meters per second does the basin produce, thank you very much …

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Hi @felipeskull ,

If you take a look at the user’s guide chapter for the Annual Water Yield model (https://storage.googleapis.com/releases.naturalcapitalproject.org/invest-userguide/latest/annual_water_yield.html#interpreting-results), you’ll see that what you’re looking for is possible with a simple conversion of units:

At the basin/watershed level, the vector output\watershed_results_wyield_[Suffix].shp has the field wyield_vol, which is already in units of cubic meters. So, if you know how many hectares your watershed covers, you can divide wyield_vol by the number of hectares.

Note that for per-pixel outputs, these are calculated by the model, but, as the user’s guide states:

These pixel-scale maps are not to be interpreted for understanding of hydrological processes or to inform decision making of any kind.

So, beware of how you interpret any per-pixel outputs.

Hope this helps,
James

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One additional note is that I wouldn’t recommend creating a flow value from the result of the model, unless you are very clear that it only represents an annual average value. Water flow is likely to change significantly over the course of the year, and these sub-annual differences are not captured by the Annual Water Yield model.

~ Stacie

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Hello, I have certain doubts and problems that I want to clarify. In the work that I am doing, I need to make a cartography of the water yield expressed in M3/ha, it is still not clear to me how I can obtain this raster layer, I have thought of using the water yield tiff and dividing it by the number of millimeters in a cubic meter, but I only get express in M3 but I need to express it in hectare, I don’t know how to get a map expressed in M3/ha, I would like you to help me get the water yield map but by M3/ha. …Thanks a lot