VBET tool for riparian zones in Western Australia - User Inquiry

[joewheaton]

A User submitted this inquiry:

VBET tool for riparian zones in Western Australia Hi Joe,

I am trying to use the VBET tool (using ArcMap 10.6) to derive a riparian zone for the Avon River Basin in Western Australia. I have a 10m DEM and hydrographic stream network but have been unable to get the tool to run. It stalls about 2-3 hours in to the analysis while “Calculating Drainage Area”; the error I get is variations on the one below:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<string>", line 193, in execute

  File "G:\WNRMShared\G4 Corporate Governance\GO4063_NRM Strategy and Dashboard\TPC\Sedimentation\Riparian Zone\VBET_0.2.1\VBET_0.2.1\VBET.py", line 62, in main

    calc_drain_area(DEM)

  File "G:\WNRMShared\G4 Corporate Governance\GO4063_NRM Strategy and Dashboard\TPC\Sedimentation\Riparian Zone\VBET_0.2.1\VBET_0.2.1\VBET.py", line 201, in calc_drain_area

    DrainArea.save(DrArea_path)

RuntimeError: ERROR 999998: Unexpected Error.

Failed to execute (VBETtool).

Failed at Fri Mar  9 17:37:00 2018 (Elapsed Time: 3 hours 3 minutes 50 seconds)

Can you provide any assistance? I have Googled the stuffing out of it and have come to the conclusion that something in the script doesn’t agree with the fields in my stream network. So I tried to run the NHD Network Builder but that didn’t run successfully either. I am very excited by this tool and would love to get it to run.

Regards,

[joewheaton]

Glad to hear you're having a play with VBET down under. @jtgilbert and @wally-mac or @bangen may have better or further ideas then below.

By far, the longest geoprocessing operation in VBET is the drainage area calculation. 2-3 hours for a large area is totally plausible. From what you described, it sounds to me like its actually doing the drainage area calculation fine (for 2-3 hours of chugging away) and then it crashes when writing that to disc? However, here's what comes to mind from what you've provided as possibilities:

• There is a strong possibility given this is using ArcPy code that the space in your path "G:\WNRMShared\G4 Corporate Governance\GO4063_NRM Strategy and Dashboard\TPC\Sedimentation\Riparian Zone\VBET_0.2.1\VBET_0.2.1\VBET.py" is causing the write to disc operation to crash. I would try running the tool not from that horrible burried path on a network drive, but from a local drive (e.g. c:\VBET\MyProject) and see if it works. If it does you can always move it over to that network path.
• If this is still crashing in the tool, you can always run a flow accumulation drainage area calculation separately and then load this as an input to the tool in the optional Drainage Area Calculation Raster (make sure units are square kilometers).
• I am not 100% sure that the tool works or has been tested in 10.6 (sometimes there are Python dependencies that are version specific (annoyingly)

Let us know if it works.

[joewheaton]

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