Tennessee Rivers

Flow Accumulation · 30 m DEM

What you're looking at

Every river, creek, and drainage in Tennessee — extracted from raw USGS 30 m elevation. The ridge-and-valley Appalachian topography in the east produces classic dendritic drainage; the western plains drain directly to the Mississippi.

Watershed Stats

SourceUSGS 3DEP 30 m

Stream segments138,370 (vector)

Max Strahler order8

MainstemsTennessee + Cumberland

AlgorithmD8 + Strahler

ToolWhitebox Tools

Major Rivers

Mississippi (Memphis)S8
Tennessee R. (Chattanooga)S7
Cumberland (Nashville)S7
French Broad (Smokies)S5
Duck RiverS5

How it works

The Tennessee River is the largest tributary of the Ohio (which is the largest tributary of the Mississippi). Together with the parallel Cumberland system, it drains most of the state. Both flow roughly north before the Tennessee bends sharply west — a hydrological oddity caused by Pleistocene drainage capture.

Same engine, any scale: this is the same pipeline that renders a 160-acre RTK survey at sub-meter resolution. Only the bounding box changes.

Sources & tools listed at /data