Hydrology tool dataset in ArcGIS 10.1 for calculating slope?

Question

I am quite new to the hydrology toolset in ArcGIS and thought it may be useful for extracting slope data from a raster. I was wondering if anyone had experience trying to extract slope data upslope from a point?

I basically need to find a location 10 meters (on the ground, not as the crow flies) up the steepest slope from a known X,Y location. As a 10m buffer will not take into account surface geomorphology, I was wondering if anyone had any ideas regarding tools that could be useful? Seems like drainage tools could be handy in this case, but I'm not sure which ones to use or how to create a polyline from drainage raster datasets.

This would eventually be put into a python script to automate slope extraction for landslides.

Answer 1

If you can create polylines representing your stream networks (essentially a map of flow accumulation), then you can use the sample tool to extract raster values along a line and export these values (for example) into excel. You can do this with slope values to get a profile of slope along the river and with elevation values to get standard elevation profile.

Check out these guides on using spatial analyst and hydrology tools with DEMs. They tell you how to extract river profiles and catchments etc... if that is of help at all.

http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/mattal/Topo1Arc10.pdf

http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/mattal/Topo2Arc10.pdf