Managing large numbers of rasters

Question

Hi

I'm currently trying to make a map doc using 202 raster DEMs, but I'm finding that Arc keeps crashing. At present I am just using the rasters as normal individual layers and am wondering if this is just too much data for my system to handle.

Can anyone suggest a better way of bringing together this many rasters?

The DEMs are the outputs from an ice sheet model and each raster represents the ice cover at a given point during the modelled time period. They are all of the same area and I need to overlay them in the same map doc, so that I can click through and see the changes. I will also need to do some basic processing to get polygon outlines of the ice cover for each raster and to use the Raster Calculator to sum multiple rasters.

I am using Arc 10.1 with a basic licence.

Thanks!

JacobBoyle · Answer

Hi Camilla,

As James said, a mosaic would most likely be your best option, but it's not available at the basic level.  You could try some general house keeping like calculating statistics and building pyramids if you haven't already.

More than likely, you're going to have to work with less images at a time though, 200+ DEM's would be a challenge for any 32 bit application to render.  Keep in mind that you can run multiple instances of ArcMap on one machine too.

JamesPierce · Answer

You could start by researching Mosaic Datasets.