Yosemite Rivers

Flow Accumulation · 30 m DEM

What you're looking at

Tuolumne and Merced rivers — both glacially carved — descend the western Sierra Nevada through Yosemite. They eventually merge into the San Joaquin in the Central Valley. Pairs with the Yosemite parks page for a side-by-side terrain ↔ drainage comparison.

Watershed Stats

SourceUSGS 3DEP 30 m

Stream segments3,427 (vector)

Max Strahler order6

Pairs with/parks/yosemite (1m lidar)

AlgorithmD8 + Strahler

ToolWhitebox Tools

Major Rivers

Tuolumne (Tuolumne Meadows)S5
Merced (El Capitan)S5
Tenaya CreekS4
Cathedral CreekS3

How it works

At 30 m the granite-dominated terrain shows minimal drainage development (rock doesn't hold tributaries the way soil does), but the major glacially-carved valleys are clear. Compare with the 1 m lidar elevation on the parks page to see how the same landscape reads differently in elevation vs flow accumulation.

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.

Paired mapSatellite + Lidar →The valley in 0.5m NAIP aerial over 1m lidar terrain — with these streams overlaid.

Sources & tools listed at /data