I have a student who is doing an analysis of hydraulic head along water transmission pipes in LA. He has an elevation surface and the total lines connecting various facilities across LA county.
What he needs from this data are to break up the transmission lines into segments based on uniform slope. So along the path of the transmission line we'd break the line up into smaller sections based on that section having a roughly constant rise/run.
We don't need segments of even elevation.
A slope surface wont help as we need the slope along the direction of pipe, not in the direction of the steepest terrain.
We can't just calc rise over run for his segments becasue we don't have the run part. We are basically looking for the natural breaks in elevation changes and making segments between those breaks.
This seems straightforward but has been very difficult to work out.
Any ideas for a workflow?
- david
If you have the 3D analyst try the profile tool
you can use the interpolate line tool
there are other approaches, such as converting a polyline path to a raster, then converting to points and extracting the underlying elevations from that...but that raises issues of cell spacing coordination