topic Re: Generating bathymetric contours using depth points and an existing shoreline in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Generating bathymetric contours using depth points and an existing shoreline

ZacharyGoodrich2 — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 12:22:33 GMT

I am trying to generate bathymetric contours in a pond. I have a polygon feature class which delineates the existing shoreline at a set water height, and I have a point feature class which represent pond depths at different points throughout the pond. The data was collected with a sonar bobber, and so these depth points are not equally spaced from one another.

I have been able to generate rasters using several different tools, including Kriging, Topo to Raster, and Point to Raster. Then I have used the Contour tool to generate contours from these rasters.

The problem is that the rasters, and subsequently the contours that are generated are not strictly accounting for the shoreline boundary. I end up with bathymetric contours that are converging with the shoreline, instead of running parallel to it. I have tried generating points along the shoreline at zero depth, and I am still having issues even with this.

Can do a series of processes or options within a tool that will allow me to specify the shoreline polygon/line as a contour in and of itself? Is there another way to do this?

Thank you in advance for any help.

Re: Generating bathymetric contours using depth points and an existing shoreline

DanPatterson — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 14:12:34 GMT

Did you specify a 'coast' option for Topo to Raster along with your point inputs? (TopoCoast ([inFeatures,...]))

Topo to Raster (Spatial Analyst)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

Re: Generating bathymetric contours using depth points and an existing shoreline

ZacharyGoodrich2 — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 19:56:18 GMT

Thank you for the reply. This worked great! I did not notice this coast option earlier, but I input the shoreline as a polygon and specified as coast.

I still had a few issues with contours getting cut off. Although they no longer overlapped, they got close to the coast/shoreline and then just stopped. I suspect this may have to do something with the raster cell size, and how the boundary between the generated raster and shoreline is not perfect. Perhaps I could have dug further to understand what could be done differently in either Contours or Topo to Raster, but I just ended up manually editing these contours to connect and merge them.