convertWeatherZones {MazamaSpatialUtils}

Convert NWS Public Forecast Zones Shapefile.

Description

Create a simple features data frame for NWS weather forecast zones.

The full resolution file will be named "WeatherZones.rda". In addition, "_05", _02" and "_01" versions of the file will be created that that are simplified to 5%, 2% and 1%. Simplified versions will greatly improve the speed of both searching and plotting.

Usage

convertWeatherZones()

Details

A weather forecast zone shapefile is downloaded and converted to a simple features data frame with additional columns of data. The resulting file will be created in the spatial data directory which is set with setSpatialDataDir().

The source data is from 2022-09-13.

Value

Name of the datasetName being created.

Note

Records with a duplicated zoneID column (typically representing coastal land and its watery inlets separately) are combined so that zoneID becomes a unique identifier.

From the source documentation:

The NWS issues forecasts and some watches and warnings for public zones which usually are the same as counties but in many cases are subsets of counties. Counties are subset into zones to allow for more accurate forecasts because of the differences in weather within a county due to such things as elevation or proximity to large bodies of water.

References

https://www.weather.gov/gis/PublicZones