Distance Between Two Point Types on Polyline ArcGIS Pro

Question

Hi ESRI community!

I'm having a bit of trouble with measuring the distance between points on a polyline on ArcGIS Pro. I have a dam layer (points) and a stream layer (polyline) and my goal is to create a raster with values along the stream that correspond to the distance from dams. Considering streams are not straight, I can't just create a buffer around the dams and determine distance that way. I was thinking about plotting points along the streams every kilometer or so and measuring the distance along the polyline to the dams, but I can't figure out how to do that. That would involve measuring the distance between two different point types (1. the dams and 2. the points along the river) and then somehow writing that information into the attribute table for the points along the river.

Another thought I had was if there was some way to plot points along a polyline but radiating from a specific point. I know you can plot points every x distance but is there a way to plot them every, say, 1 km from a point along the polyline?

This is also on a very large scale with over 2,000 dams across multiple states so I can't do it by hand.

Does anyone have any experience with something like this?

Thanks!

Anonymous User · Answer

Hi Joseph

Glad to hear that it works. We're working on the performance.

If you have access to a big multi-core machine, you can experiment with the PArallel Processing Factor gp environment to see if that helps performance. If you have access to an ArcGIS Enterprise installation with a multi-machine Raster Analytics service you can use the Calculate Distance task to distribute the work across all the machines in the RA cluster.

Regards,

-jt

JosephApodaca · Answer

Hi Jim,

Thank you so much! I used the Euclidean Distance with Barriers tool and it worked perfectly. I will say that if you are using this tool on a large scale (over 4 states with a raster resolution of 30 x 30 meters) it will take an extremely long time to run (multiple days). I ended up creating a buffer around the dams, clipping the barrier raster to the buffered region, and then running it just within those areas to minimize the number of cells.

Thanks again for your help!

Anonymous User · Answer

Hello Joseph:

If your dam points are directly located on the streams, then a raster-based approach to this might be able to use the new 'euclidean distance with barriers' functionality released at 10.7/2.4. In this case, the sources would be the dams and the 'barriers' would be a raster representing every cell that isn't a stream cell. Your raster resolution needs to be sufficient to preserve individual stream segments.

With the distance tools that are coming out in pro 2.5 you also have the option of using an auxiliary DEM as an input so that the accumulated distance-along-stream values are calculated over the terrain instead of in a plane.

The raster approach gets a bit trickier if the dams are not exactly on the streams. Its tempting to define a cost surface with high cost for land cells and low cost for stream cells, but your output accumulation values are then no longer measuring euclidean distance. Maybe you can use the NEAR tool in that case to snap dams to nearest stream as a preprocessing step.

The network approach would be to create multiple concentric drive time areas...

Let us know if it works!

Regards,

-Jim TenBrink

spatial analyst team