I am interested in building a raster of the distance from rivers in a territory under study. I have digitized the course of the rivers in ArcGis 10.1.
I have used the 'Euclidean Distance' tool to create a raster of the distance from rivers. Now, since we are moving in a 3D world, not in a 2D one, I would like to 'weight' the calculated distances in order to take the elevation into account.
So, I would like to know how can I create a raster depicting the distance of any point from rivers, also taking into account the elevation variable.
Best Answer
if you need more advanced distance calculation, you should use the Path distance instead of the Euclidian distance. This allow you to account for the slope in the direction of the movement, which is necessary to adapt the true distance with respect to the elevation (using an elevation change as a cost raster does not work because this elevation change is only valid in one out of 8 directions).
You do not have to use all feature, but you can define a vertical raster and a vertical factor (see here for the details)
EDIT: if you need to compute "best" path from A to B, you can use cost path with the result of the path distance (including the optional backlink raster) instead of Euclidian cost and direction rasters. Note that contrary to euclidian distance, best path from A to B might not be the same as "best" path from B to A.