Hello,
I've recently compiled a folder of rasters downloaded from the USGS 3DEP source data via the National Map Download viewer. One individual tile is attached here for reference. I'm using ArcGIS Pro 3.1.
When I add the directory of rasters to an existing mosaic dataset, they do not align properly with the rest of the rasters in the mosaic dataset.
The issue has been documented in BUG-000112119
It has been elaborated upon in this very helpful post from Kirk Waters at NOAA, titled, "Is That Georeferencing Really Wrong? "
I'm drawing attention to it here because it doesn't seem to be fixed yet, and has cost a lot of time.
The workaround to the problem is to define the projection for each raster in the directory. For example, use arcpy.DefineProjection on a list of rasters in a folder, then use an ESRI .prj file to define the projection. This needs to be done (as elaborated on in the above NOAA post) so that Pro can read the standard parallel parameter correctly. Otherwise, the raster will be interpreted with a "custom" projection, which does not align properly in space. However, doing this workaround either in batch mode or in arcpy takes an excessive amount of time, even on a high-performance computer.
For example, in a processing run that I am currently monitoring comprised of ~ 6070 individual raster tiles- each raster takes on average 1.5 minutes to have its projection defined. This will take 152 hours to finish. This is unacceptable because I cannot run the HPC (which is virtualized) for more than 96 hours at a time for a given geoprocessing task. It is also unacceptable to download this many rasters and work with them locally. Therefore, I will have to break this up in to 2 or more geoprocessing runs, and wait several days to make any progress on something that is trivial.
Please work to implement an actual fix to BUG-000112119 (rather than a workaround solution) to the way that GDAL generated projection parameters are read in ArcGIS Pro. And, if you have time, please help me understand why it is necessary to maintain proprietary projection formats? Can't we all just use OGC formats by now? Or do I do not understand something that is fundamental about software (these are honest questions - not meant to be snarky).
Thank you for your time,
Trevor Hobbs
