nldas.centroid.lookup: NLDAS County Centroid Lookup
In akeyel/wnvdata: West Nile Virus Public Data Sets

Description Usage Format Source

Create a file that can be used to identify which NLDAS cells correspond to the county centroid for every county in the US. Census data used the US Census 2017 shapefile. Centroids were calculated using ArcGIS 10.6 using the Feature to Point (Data Management) tool. The latitude and longitude for each NLDAS cell were exported to a point file with information on the row and column from the NLDAS grid. Sixty-eight centroids that fell outside the NLDAS grid were moved to a nearby appropriate location within the grid. In part, some county boundaries extend into bodies of water, so the centroid was in the water, rather than in the actual county. In the case of some, they were on islands too small to fill a grid cell (e.g., Florida-Dukes (Keys) moved to the mainland, and Massachusetts-Nantucket was moved to Martha's Vineyard. A 'moved' column indicates counties with moved centroids. These were then merged with the census centroid file using the spatial join (analysis tool), and exported to .csv format.