Agro-Climatic Data by County (ACDC): Methods and Data Generating Processes

Due to the recent popularity of raster imagery data (high resolution grid cell data), the demand for weather, soil/land and related data for research and applied decision support is increasing rapidly. Agro-Climatic Data by County (ACDC) is designed to provide the most widely-used variables extracted from the most popular high resolution gridded data sources to end users of agro-climatic variables who may not be equipped to process large geospatial datasets from multiple publicly available sources that are provided in different data formats and spatial scales. Annual county level crop yield data in USDA NASS for 1981-2015 are provided for corn, soybeans, upland cotton and winter wheat yields, and customizable growing degree days (GDDs) and cumulative precipitation for two groups of months (March-August and April-October) to capture different growing season periods for the crops from the PRISM weather data. Soil characteristic data in gSSURGO are also included for each county in the data set. All weather and soil data are processed based using NLCD land cover/land use data to exclude data for land that is not being used for non-forestry agricultural uses. This paper explains the numerical and geocomputational methods and data generating processes employed in ACDC