This Catalog contains Geographic Information System (GIS) data in georeferenced vector (point) and raster format. The vector (point) data are available in Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) shapefile format and in comma-separated text (*.csv) files. Shapefiles generally include *.shp, *.shx, *.xml, and *.dbf files at a minimum. All of these data files also include the *.prj files, which contain the dataset projection information. The corresponding 4-km resolution raster data are available in ESRI GRID format.
The GIS files have been bundled by year. Each data type (shp, GRID, csv) has a compressed WinRAR zip fileāone for each year, hence every zip file may contain up to 12 months of data. In addition to the spatial data, we provide Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) -compliant metadata in text. The metadata text files are bundled with their corresponding zip files.