How was the new weather file created?
The list of cities was taken from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Populated Places (PPL) database (which is part of USGS’s Geographic Names Information System). The PPL database contains the name, location (latitude/longitude), elevation, and sometimes the population of over 165,000 locations in the U.S. and its possessions. We mapped each of the PPL locations to a best available NOAA weather station as a source of heating degree-days, cooling degree-days, and other climate parameters. The new REScheck weather file contains the subset of the PPL locations for which the USGS has a population estimate (a little more than 22,000 cities).
