Tutorial for Reading DEM into Landlab

This is a tutorial that will walk you through the steps to import a DEM into Landlab and create a raster model grid.

Note: To use this tutorial, you should have Landlab (version 1.0) installed on your computer. To install Landlab, please follow the instructions @ https://landlab.github.io/#/#install

The starting point is to obtain a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) in ESRI's Ascii Grid format, or convert it to this format. The format consists of a 6-line header followed by elevation values. Here we'll work with a small example DEM file 'west_bijou_gully.asc' (attached in this resource). The header for this file is as follows:
ncols 43
nrows 89
xllcorner 559705.000000000000
yllcorner 4380220.000000000000
cellsize 3
NODATA_value 0
Here, our objective is to translate the contents of this file into a Landlab RasterModelGrid.

This tutorial also illustrates setting boundary conditions on DEMs and using the halo option for reading in DEMs without nodata values around the edges.
For this we will use the resource 'synthetic_landsacpe.asc'.

Citing Landlab:
Tucker, G.E., Gasparini, N.M., Istanbulluoglu, E., Hobley, D.E.J., Nudurupati, S.S., Adams, J.M., and Hutton, E. (2013). Landlab v1.0. https://landlab.github.io.