The AWASH model attempts to capture the variable landscape of climate, economics, and infrastructure by modeling the county scale in the United States. This is one of the highest resolution used by Water-Energy-Food models, with the US split into 3,144 counties containing about 100,000 people and 1,200 square miles each. While a huge amount of information is available at this level, county-level data is maintained by many different organizations (within the US government and without) and provided in a plethora of formats. To standardize socioeconomic information, we developed a new tool which we are making available to you.

The county-data tool is provided from a collaboration between the Columbia Water Center and RDCEP at the University of Chicago. The tool contains a range of ready-to-use datasets, a tool for combining their data into a common format, and a framework for adding new datasets. The current data collection includes:

● Climate data from WorldClim and Elevation data from GLOBE
● Climate impacts data from the ACP
● Water use data from USGS
● Agricultural production data from USDA and economic data from ERS
● Renewable energy potential data from NREL
● Census data from the Census Bureau
● Public health data from AHRF and mortality data from the CDC
● Crime data from the FBI
● National election results data from various sources
● Labor demographics from BLS

The “export tool” allows you to load each of these datasets, select the variables you want, and write them to a file. The data is all stored in its original source format, so it’s easy to update.

For more information, and to download the tool, go to the github repository. Let us know if you found it helpful, or have more data you want us to add!