.. _Introduction:

Introduction
============

Desired technical knowledge to prepare mizuRoute inputs and process/visualize outputs:

**Geographic Information System (GIS)**: River and catchment are represented by line and polygon respectively in mizuRoute. These "vector" spatial data (ESRI shapefile, Geopackage) are handled with GIS software.
`QGIS <https://qgis.org/>`_ is a free GIS software that works on Windows, Mac and Linux. QGIS is intuitive, and convenient when interactively viewing spatial data (zoom, pan) and creating a map, and query of spatial elements.
GDAL library, and/or python packages e.g., geopanda, are also usefull and best used programically to manupulate the geometries and attributes.

**netCDF**: Though river spatial data usually originate from line and polygon vector spatial data, these vector data are eventually converted into netCDF for mizuRoute input.
Output from mizuRoute is also netCDF file.
Basic technical knowledge on netCDF operations using netCDF commands (ncdump, nccopy etc.) and NCO and python are required to effectively work on mizuRoute input and output.


User's guide provides the following instructions on setup mizuRoute:

:doc:`1.2. Building model <Build_model>` provide stand-alone mizuRoute build instruction: external libraries requirement and step-by-step instruction on how to compile the model.

:doc:`1.3. Control file <Control_file>` provide information on how to setup a control file (configuration file), and various control variables.

:doc:`1.4. Input data <Input_files>` provide input data requirement for river or lake routing.

:doc:`1.5. Hillslope model parameters <Hill>` provides information on in-basin or hillslope routing (before river or in-channel routing).

:doc:`1.6. River model parameters <Riv>` provides information on in-basin or hillslope routing (before river or in-channel routing).

:doc:`1.7. Lake model setup <lake>` section provide instructions on how to modify river network into river-lake network, lake model parameter specification, control variable related to lake model.

:doc:`1.8. Output files <Output_files>` provide information on the output files types and their variables.

:doc:`1.9. testCase data <testCase>` provide a link to testCase including model setup and data for river routing only.