Best way to clean up a DEM?

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06-05-2013 06:39 AM
DougComer
New Contributor
I am working with a LIDAR generated DEM for an island, and there is a lot of noise and artificial geometry in the raster. I can successfully clip the island with a vector mask, but that returns a very irregularly shaped raster and seems to be breaking all of my spatial analyst tools. Ideally, I would like to classify every value outside of the mask as 0 to maintain a workable raster, but I am unsure of how to do this. Every tool that I've used with the mask (extract, clip) just gives me the island-shaped raster. My question is two-fold - is there a better way to do this and are irregularly shaped rasters fundamentally unusable with surface modeling tools?


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2 Replies
JeffreySwain
Esri Regular Contributor
I am not sure an irregular shape would be breaking your Spatial Analyst tools.  Perhaps the format, size or some other factor is causing the issue?  What output format are you using?  What bit depth are you exporting to?  How large is your raster file size wize?  Which Spatial Analyst Tools are you using?  If you are having specific issues with a tool or dataset, then I would recommend contacting Esri Support and creating an incident for specific help, but if you can answer the questions above perhaps something will seem to cause it.
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DougComer
New Contributor
It turned out to be a server issue, despite ArcMap giving me map algebra and format errors (along with the dreaded 999999). It's a very strange situation (complicated by the fact that Spatial Analyst would not work but equivalent tools in 3D analyst would) but since I moved the .gdb to a local hard drive things have cleared up. Thank you for your advice - I will be sure to double check these settings in the future as well.
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