The Amenity Scale
Our friend Brecht informs us that "Measuring Beauty," an article in the most recent Scientific American, analyzes what non-political variables drive people to immigrate to the United States, principally to rural areas. The map above combines the study's six primary indices - warm winter (average January temperature), winter sun (average January days of sun), temperate summer (low winter-summer temperature gap), summer humidity (low average July humidity), topographic variation (topography scale) and water area (water area as proportion of total county area). The raw data is provided as well, but apparently not in a GIS format.
The raw data can be joined to county shapefiles available from U.S. Census bureau. (http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/bdy_files.html) Join on the FIPS field in the raw data and concatinate the state and county fields to make the FIPS code in the shapefile dbf file. Its a couple of steps but it works.
Posted by: Minemapper | 02/28/2006 at 14:28