NaturalCapitalAccounting

workspace to support development of NCA tables

Team Members

Zach Ancona - USGS: Denver John Fay - Duke University Rajendra Poudel - NOAA Charles Rhodes - ORISE post-doc, at USEPA - OW/ORD Brian Voigt - University of Vermont

Land Account (Zach will add detail on data) Land Use Dataset for 2010 created by David M. Theobald NLUD: Vermont, Maryland, Delaware Land Cover Datasets for 2001, 2006 and 2011 from NLCD NLCD (2001,2006,2011): Vermont, Maryland, Delaware

A tool/script to concatenate land cover and land use data. Using, for example, ArcGIS’ combine tool on a land use and land cover dataset would give a raster dataset with both land use and cover attributes. Concatenating the land use and cover fields would then allow the accountant to distinguish between e.g., forests used for industrial forestry, community forestry, and conservation. Using the concatenated land use and cover dataset with tool 1 would allow land use-cover change to be easily tracked in the land and ecosystem accounts.

Water Account

This project hosts code to assemble water budget data for the US from existing data sources.

Budget data are comprised of elements of annual water supply and annual water consumption for a specific geographic unit (e.g. state). Values are measured in both physical and monetary terms.

Water source data:

• Annual environmental water supply data are derived from downscaled CMIP5 hydrology projections (link). These data include monthly estimates of runoff, precipitation, evapotranspiration, and soil moisture content at a 1/8th degree spatial resolution across the US for the period of 1950 to 2099. Estimates are provided for 21 different climate projection ensembles applied to the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) Macroscale Hydrologic Model (link); see the PDF document for a complete list. For demonstration purposes, this project uses the National Center for Atmospheric Research CCSM4 2.6 projection ensembles as the base data for water supply figures.

  The scripts execute the following:

  • WaterUseData.py:

    • Downloads monthly runoff (total_runoff), precipitation (pr), evapotranspiration (et), and soil moisture content (smc) data, in NetCDF format, from a central data repository (link) for a given sample year (2000, 2005, and 2010).
    • Extracts the monthly data from the downloaded NetCDF files into 4-dimensional NumPy arrays (time, parameter value, latitude, longitude).
    • Aggregates the time dimension (months) into annual sums, resulting in a 3-dimensional array for each parameter, i.e. a single annual value for each 1/8th degree coordinate pair.

  • Combines these 3-dimensional arrays, one for each parameter, into a single data frame listing parameter value, latitude, and longitude.

    • Longitude	Latitude	Runoff	Precip	ET	SoilMoisture

  • Using the coordinate pairs, assigns the state and county FIPS code to each record by appending a series of FIPS codes generated by spatially joining coordinate pairs with a county feature class using ArcGIS.

  • Summarize the data by state or county, saving the results as a table for a given year.

Water use (and reuse) data

• Water use/reuse data are derived from USGS water use data (link). These data include estimated water usage by category (public supply, domestic, industrial, etc.) at the county level for the entire US for the years 2000, 2005, and 2010. (Data for previous years are available, though the spatial units are different.)

  Scripts are provided here to:

  • Retrieve the data for a particular year.
  • Summarize by state and by sector.

Data compilation

• The supply and use/re-use tables are reformatted to populate cells in a formatted Excel worksheet.