Hi, I am new to ArcGIS and would really appreciate your help understanding how to work the Path Distance tool. I have read the documentation and thought that I understood how the vertical and horizontal factors work, but I was wrong. I would like to calculate the distance for the shortest uphill path to a "source" for each point in the raster. That is, we can only move uphill or flat - we can not go downhill. To do so, I'm using the Path Distance tool in the Spatial Analyst in ArcMap. Here are the parameters that I've been setting: input raster: just a single point that i created in a shapefile - this is my "source" - the tiny blue dot on the image below input cost raster: nothing input surface raster: dem (the image is to the right, and the blue point is my "source") horizontal factor parameters: binary horizontal factor; zero factor = 1; cut angle = 180 (i don't care about the horizontal factor, so I want it to be able to move as it wants) vertical factor parameters: input vertical raster: dem vertical factor: binary zero factor: 1 low cut angle: 0 (because I don't want it to be able to go downhill) high cut angle: 90 (steep angle is not the problem, as long as we're going up) When I run the tool, the output I get is not at all what I expect. I am attaching that here as well (to the left). I don't expect this symmetry, since the point is located on the slope. I expect all locations uphill of it to not have a path, so there shouldn't even be any distances. Please help me understand what parameters I am setting wrong. Any input is much appreciated! Thanks a lot.
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