Good morning!
Thank you both for your replies. Here are some additional thoughts:
My study area is large (India to China) so I would need both winds and currents to be variable. The blog link you provided links back to this discussion, could you repost it please?
- In order to take into consideration the direction of both the wind and the current you need to combine them before running the Path Distance tool, or the new Distance Accumulation tool.
- When you combine wind and current direction the resulting horizontal factor raster will need to show the direction of least cost travel considering both wind and current.
This is the bit I am having the most problems in. As far as I understand, the horizontal factor would be used to take into account the effects of wind directionality while sailing: for example it is easier to sail when you are in broad reach and harder when close-hauled (see Alberti 2018, TRANSIT: a GIS toolbox for estimating the duration of ancient sail-powered navigation, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15230406.2017.1403376, p. 515-517/p. 6-8 in PDF/chapter 3 on the HTML version). The currents instead would push you in the same way regardless of the direction. If I were to sum winds and currents together, then the currents would also be affected by the horizontal factor? Could also very well be that my thinking is way off and I am missing something...
Looking forward to more comments!
Wesa 🙂