ArcGIS Pro 2.0 and ArcGIS 10.5.1 are now available for download! Some exciting new capabilities have been added for the Spatial Analyst extension. Read on for more details.
What’s New
For these releases, we have added some new capabilities to existing tools, added some new tools, and added to ArcGIS Pro a tool that was previously only available in 10.5.1.
You can read more about all the changes that were made in the respective what’s new topics for ArcGIS Pro 2.0 and 10.5.1. In this blog, we’ll focus on specific changes for users of the Spatial Analyst extension.
Spatial Analyst toolbox
Interpolation toolset
The Spline with Barriers tool is now also available in ArcGIS Pro. For this implementation, it has been reengineered from a Script tool to be a native GP tool. This provides a benefit for performance and scalability, and avoids any JAVA dependancy.
Surface toolset
The Slope and Aspect tools have had some notable changes in capability.
- Geodesic calculation
The traditional way by which the calculations were performed was a planar method, whereby the computation is performed on a projected, flat plane using a 2D Cartesian coordinate system. There is a new geodesic method available, where the computation is performed considering the shape of the Earth to be an ellipsoid. This method generally will produce a more accurate result than the default planar method does. - GPU support
Slope and Aspect are the newest tools that support GPU processing. If you have a suitable NVIDIA GPU card with CUDA Compute capability of 3.0 or higher, you can take advantage of this improvement. Please see the GPU processing with Spatial Analyst topic in the help for more information on the supported hardware and configuration details. - NoData handling
The other change to these tools has to do with the way NoData cells and boundary cells are handled. For each processing cell, at least seven of the eight neighbouring cells are required to have a valid value (not NoData) in order for a cell value to be returned. If fewer than seven cells have a valid value (or the processing cell is itself NoData), the output for that location will be NoData. Related to this, the outermost rows and columns of the output raster will also now be NoData. This is because along the edge of the input raster, those cells will not have the required number of valid values with which to perform the calculation.
Segmentation and Classification toolset
For Pro, two new tools have been added that will help you to generate and inspect your classification training samples. See Generate Training Samples From Seed Points and Inspect Training Samples for more details.
Interactive Feature Input
For Pro, the new Interactive feature input capability comes to certain Spatial Analyst tools. More details and some tips with using it are available in the blog post here.
Release Notes and Issues fixed
If interested, you can see a number of the issues that were fixed by going to these links for Pro 2.0 and 10.5.1.
Spatial Analyst Supplemental tools
Attention waster resource professionals! In case you missed it, Neeraj here on the Spatial Analyst team recently put up a blog post about the new Storage Capacity tool he added to v1.4 of our Spatial Analyst Supplemental tools. Be sure to give it a try.
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