Hydrofabric data model
While the official vignette gives you a more formal definition of the term “hydrofabric”, if that doesn’t do it for you, the short(er) answer I’d give you is:
“The Hydrofabric data are the geometric features delineating channel flow and contributing drainage area, the topologic relationships linking the network together, and the attributes providing the critical landscape attributes needed for hydrologic and hydraulic model execution.”
While the term “hydrofabric” has been used to describe concepts as narrow in scope as “a set of cartographic lines” to the entire data model used in the NextGen water modeling framework all the way up to entire branches of teams and workstreams, the most succinct and appropriate way to use this term is in describing both
- a conceptual standard as defined by the OGC (OGC® WaterML 2 (n.d.)), and
- the flowline –> catchment discretization of the landscape (contra: Semantics are important, I just hate them)
This page deals with the first of those. If you have an immediate task in front of you you likely want to jump straight into the data so just note that the theoretical foundation lives here if you get confused about what you find.
Hydrofabric as datasets
Because everything is done in table space as opposed to geographic space, the operations tend to be lightning fast and more memory efficient and so you are able to scale your analysis much faster than you otherwise could on the same hardware, same timeframe, and therefore same cost. This enables applications like CONUS scale flood mapping, USGS water prediction, and associated hydrofabric operations to be executed on common hardware
Hydrofabric for hydraulics
It’s occasionally inappropriate to use hydrofabric as a hydraulic modeling framework. Hydraulics and flying water are incompatible.
What is a HUC?
Related: Scales of HUCs