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What's New for Spatial Analyst in ArcGIS Pro 3.6

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JuanLaguna
by Esri Contributor
Esri Contributor
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The Spatial Analyst extension offers new and improved capabilities in ArcGIS Pro 3.6. This release gives you the ability to compare suitability models as well as five new tools for Density, Hydrology, and Surface analysis. Two other tools have new capabilities, with improvements made for several others. Read on to learn more.


How to get it

 

We released ArcGIS Pro 3.6 on Thursday November 13, 2025. Download and install it.

For a complete summary of all the changes and improvements in this release, see the Your ArcGIS Pro Update (November 2025) blog post and video.

What’s changed for Spatial Analyst?

 

Listed here are the main functional areas with improvements over the last release:


1. Suitability Modeler
2. Density analysis
3. Hydrology analysis
4. Multivariate analysis
5. Segmentation and Classification analysis
6. Surface analysis
7. Zonal analysis
8. GPU Environments
9. Rectangular cell handling
10. Spatial Analyst Supplemental Tools v2.0

 

1. Suitability Modeler

 

The Suitability Modeler in ArcGIS Pro (available with the Spatial Analyst extension) is a capable and established way to perform siting analysis in an interactive exploratory experience. However, that may present a challenge as you accumulate more suitability models.

With this release, the new Model Comparison interface gives you the ability to compare different suitability models to each other. This allows you to perform tasks such as:

  • Identify between multiple models where they are similar and where they are different.
  • Explore what-if scenarios with various weights and settings.
  • Select the model that best achieves your objectives.

A selection of predefined statistics are provided to aid the comparison.


Click on the following link to see a short video showing this feature in action.



2. Density analysis

 

In the area of density analysis, two capabilities are often requested. One is to produce volume contours that delineate the smallest area with a specified share of the whole amount of a phenomena. The other is to produce kernel density isopleths, which are boundaries of equal value at a specified percentile. These are useful for creating contours from a classified raster. Previously, generating these results required custom workflows that used several tools, custom scripts, and manual processing in other applications outside the ArcGIS platform.

With two new tools introduced in this release, you can now accomplish these workflows directly within ArcGIS Pro.

Value Percentile Contours

Use the Value Percentile Contours tool to create polygon outlines (footprints) of the highest portions of the input value surface.

Volume Percentile Contours

The Volume Percentile Contours tool outlines the smallest area that contains the chosen share of the overall amount of the input value surface.

 

Update: Dec 2, 2025:


3. Hydrology analysis

 

There are two new tools available for hydrology analysis.

Adjust Stream to Raster

Streamline features can be derived using methods that include preprocessing steps to prepare them for analysis. These steps ensure that the streamlines accurately represent observed water flow. Often, the data is shared for further analysis. To ensure that any additional analysis inputs (typically elevation data) match the defined streamlines, the streamline features must be adjusted while preserving the accuracy of their paths.

The new Adjust Stream to Raster tool creates a new streamline output feature that aligns with the elevation raster while also preserving the original stream paths. By ensuring consistency between the streamline and raster data, you can use them together in a hydrologic analysis whose output captures the correct streamline information.

Locate Depressions

One thing that even high-quality elevation data does not capture is the effect of storm water infrastructure, such as culverts constructed under roads. If the effects of culverts are not represented, then streams derived from that elevation data can be inaccurate.

You can use the new Locate Depressions tool to find areas that are topographically lower than the surrounding terrain where water flow may be disrupted. It provides several ways to filter depressions, such as by their geometry, depth, area, or even by their proximity to other elements like roads.

Update: Nov 25, 2025:

 

4. Multivariate analysis

 

The Band Collection Statistics tool has four new parameters that you can apply for computing and visualizing statistics. Those parameters are: Compute histogram, Number of Histogram Bins, Output Histogram Table, and Output Histogram Name. The new capability for creating histograms is useful for inspecting the distribution of cell values in multiband rasters.

The tool can now also report the output statistics file in .csv and .md formats. The tool supports several additional environments to give you more control over the analysis. Those new environments are: Cell Size, Cell Size Projection Method, Extent, Geographic Transformations, Mask, Output Coordinate System, and Snap Raster.

 

5. Segmentation and Classification analysis

 

For the Linear Spectral Unmixing tool, use the new Remove Continuum parameter to specify whether the spectra are or are not normalized from an image or reference data. The Spectral File or Training Features parameter supports two additional file formats, an Esri Spectral Library file (.esl), and an ENVI Spectral Library file (.sli).

 

6. Surface analysis

 

In landscape analysis, Topographic Position Index (TPI) is one of the fundamental indexes used in geomorphometry to characterize surface landforms. It evaluates the elevation of each location on a surface relative to the surrounding landscape.

The new Topographic Position Index tool subtracts the mean elevation of a specified neighborhood around each cell from the actual elevation value at that location. In the resulting raster, positive TPI values typically indicate that a location is higher that its surroundings, such as for a peak or ridgeline. Negative TPI values indicate a location that is lower than its surroundings, such as a valley or canyon. Values closer to 0 represent gradual slopes or flat terrains. You can use the resulting raster in slope position or landform classifications.

The size and shape of the neighborhood gives you control over which types of landscape structures the tool will identify. While smaller neighborhoods are better at identifying small scale structures, larger neighborhoods are more suited for picking up larger scale structures.


7. Zonal analysis

 

The Zonal Statistics and Zonal Statistics as Table tools have an improvement in how the extent is managed when the zone input is a feature class with a selection. The default extent in this case is now the minimum of the bounding box of all selected zones and the value raster. A benefit of this is a more efficient computation of the result. In addition, by default these tools will now use the spatial reference from the value raster as the Output Coordinate System.

The Zonal Statistics, Zonal Statistics as Table, and Zonal Characterization tools can now support all processors that are available on the computer. By default, if no value is specified for the Parallel Processing Factor environment, the tools will use 80% of all available cores. The tools will apply additional cores if you set this environment to a higher value. This change provides improved performance in most cases, particularly with larger input data.


8. GPU processing

 

A GPU (graphics processing unit) is a hardware component available on some computer systems that significantly enhances speed of graphics display. A GPU can also improve the analytical performance for a geoprocessing tool that supports it.

Several Spatial Analyst tools can take advantage of GPU processing. For this release, some of those tools now support two additional environments that give you more control over how they process the data, and which GPU the computer will use for analysis. Those environments are GPU ID and Processor Type.

The affected tools by toolset are:

  • Solar toolset:
    Feature Solar Radiation and Raster Solar Radiation

  • Surface toolset:
    Aspect, Feature Preserving Smoothing, Geodesic Viewshed, Multiscale Surface Deviation, Multiscale Surface Difference, Multiscale Surface Percentile, and Slope


Learn more about GPU processing with Spatial Analyst

 

9. Rectangular cell handling

 

Raster analysis in Spatial Analyst historically operated on the premise that raster cells were square. Over time, more raster datasets have become available where the length and width of cells are not the same. In this release, several Spatial Analyst tools were updated in how they process an input raster of this nature. These tools now produce output rasters with square cells whose sides are the calculated average between the length and the width of the input cells.

 

10. Spatial Analyst Supplemental Tools 2.0

 

If you are a long time user of Spatial Analyst in ArcMap, you may recall the Supplemental Toolbox, which was a collection of tools that provided additional analytical capabilities than what was available in the core software release. In July of 2025, we released an updated version of this package for ArcGIS Pro! It includes all the capabilities available in the earlier iterations, as well as two additional tools.

The Create Flood Simulation Raster tool creates a multidimensional raster output from the flood simulation capabilities of ArcGIS Pro, which you can use to animate flood variables over time.

Use the Locate Zonal Statistics tool to identify where the cells corresponding to a calculated zonal statistic value are located within each input zone.

See the following blog post for more details on the original and new tools, as well as download and installation instructions:
Spatial Analyst Supplemental Tools v2.0 for ArcGIS Pro

 


Summary

 

The content above presents the new and improved capabilities for raster analysis in ArcGIS Pro 3.6.
Other blog posts are also available which provide more detail for some of the new capabilities. We here on the Spatial Analyst team encourage you to try out these changes and incorporate them into your own projects and workflows.

See our new resource for communicating with you about updates and technical content:

 

Additional resources:

 

Contributors
About the Author
Product Engineer on the Spatial Analyst team.