nlcdlandcover

Reads NLCD CONUS land cover files and returns land roughness within the specified region.

This function retrieves land roughness from the National Land Cover Database's (NLCD) continental US (CONUS) land cover files, i.e. nlcd_*_land_cover_l48_*.i*. You must download these files from the MRLC website: https://www.mrlc.gov/data (link good as of 6/2022). If you are interested in land cover instead of land roughness, you can easily modify the function to return land_cover instead of land_rough.

NOTE: Due to the map projection, cartesian rows and columns in the NLCD data are not parallel to lines of latitude and longitude. This function does not interpolate the output onto a regular grid. It prioritizes data accuracy over making the output easy to use.