National Land Cover Dataset 1992 (NLCD) Contents: Description Specifications Format Information Download Information

NLCD subset image (Black Hills of South Dakota)

Description

NLCD 92 (National Land Cover Data 1992) is a 21-category land cover classification scheme that has been applied consistently over the conterminous U.S. It is based primarily on the unsupervised classification of Landsat TM (Thematic Mapper) 1992 imagery. Ancillary data sources included topography, census, agricultural statistics, soil characteristics, other land cover maps, and wetlands data. The NLCD 92 classification is provided as raster data with a spatial resolution of 30 meters.

The seamless product consists of NLCD 92 for the conterminous U.S., which is provided according to a user-specified area of coverage. The data is expressed in geographic coordinates (latitude/longitude), and it is referenced to the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83).

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Specifications

Format Information

ArcGrid is an Arc/Info proprietary format. Some other software packages can read the ArcGrid format. Customers who specify ArcGrid will be delivered a workspace. The workspace is not tarred or gzipped.

BIL is a non-proprietary format made by running the GRIDIMAGE command in Arc. The data is a simple binary raster format (signed integer data). There is an accompanying ASCII header file that provides file size information (number of rows and columns). The data are stored in row major order (all the data for row 1, followed by all the data for row 2, etc.).

TIFF with world file for NLCD is a non-proprietary format. It is essentially a floating-point binary data file with accompanying ASCII descriptor files including a world file containing geographic extents for the file.

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* Bil is a binary integer point format