Running Calculate Statistics on .asc raster file gives ERROR 000840?

Question

I have a series of .asc files that are output from a modeling exercise (see image below). I need to scroll through each .asc raster, and calculate the mean pixel value within a certain outline. I can do this manually by using the "Calculate Statistics" tool in the Data Management toolbox and then clicking through to the Layer Properties of each .asc file. I have been successful at doing this but it is time consuming (see second image below).

I would prefer to create a script in Python to automate this process. However, when I try to run Calculate Statistics on these same files through Python, I get the following error:

CalculateStatistics_management(r"colby_cbp_run1\control_BP.asc", "1", "1", "", "OVERWRITE", path_to_area_of_interest)

Runtime error Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "c:\program files (x86)\arcgis\desktop10.4\arcpy\arcpy\management.py", line 14811, in CalculateStatistics raise e ExecuteError: ERROR 000840: The value is not a Mosaic Dataset. ERROR 000840: The value is not a Mosaic Layer. ERROR 000840: The value is not a Raster Dataset.

What is happening here? Is there an error in the syntax of the above command, or do I need to convert the .asc files to another format to perform this calculation using Python? Why is the tool working one way and not the other?

Answer 1

It appears that CalculateStatistics_management needs to be passed the path to the data source rather than the path to the layer.

So while this did not work:

CalculateStatistics_management(r"group_layer\my_raster.asc", "1", "1", "", "OVERWRITE", "") 

This does:

CalculateStatistics_management("C:\\my_directory\\subdirectory\\my_raster.asc", "1", "1", "", "OVERWRITE", "")

See @Donna 's question Calculating raster layer statistics using ArcPy gives ERROR 000840? for another version of the same question. Searching for questions tagged with the same error message is very useful.