How to clip multiple raster datasets with county polygons?

Question

The example below shows three raster (i.e. in black) and a single county polygon feature class. How can I clip/extract by mask the rasters by their corresponding county polygons (i.e. Edwards, Clark, Barber) in an automated fashion? For this example, the output should include three separate rasters clipped to the county boundaries. A python or ArcGIS solution suitable for batch processing would be ideal. Thanks for the help.

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score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 27 '12 at 02:12

Presumably since you want to automate this, you'll want each raster to figure out which polygon should be used to clip itself? Pseudo code:

iterate through the list of list of input rasters
convert the raster to a polygon
obtain the polygon's centroid
determine which county polygon the centroid (and therefore the raster) falls within
convert that polygon to a County raster, with a value of 1 (and everything else 0 or NULL)
multiply the county raster with the original raster

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:33

After many great suggestions from @Stephen Lead and others, I have a solution:

# Clips rasters with a polygon featureclass

import arcpy
from arcpy import env
from arcpy.sa import *
arcpy.CheckOutExtension("3D")

# Set Over write
arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = 1

# Set the workspace
env.workspace = r"Z:\temp.gdb"
Dir = env.workspace

# Local variables:
counties = r"Z:\temp.gdb\boundaries\counties"
counties_lyr = arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management(counties,"counties_lyr")

# Get the list of rasters to process
raster_list = arcpy.ListRasters("*_clp")
print raster_list

for raster in raster_list:
    # Define name and location for output raster
    name = Dir + "\\" + str(raster) + "_clp"

    # Process: Raster Domain
    arcpy.RasterDomain_3d(raster, "in_memory/temp", "POLYGON")

    # Process: Central Feature
    arcpy.MeanCenter_stats("in_memory/temp", "in_memory/temp1")

    # Process: Select Layer By Location
    arcpy.SelectLayerByLocation_management(counties_lyr, "intersect", "in_memory/temp1", "", "NEW_SELECTION")

    # Clip Raster
    arcpy.Clip_management(raster, "#", name,counties_lyr, "#", "ClippingGeometry")

    # Delete in_memory
    arcpy.Delete_management("in_memory")

    print "processing " + raster + " complete..."

print "All processing is now finished"

How to clip multiple raster datasets with county polygons?

2 Answers2