This PR adds a new shapefile to the polygon/boundaries directory that contains a 100 km dissolved buffer of the Alaskan coastline. The file was created by taking the existing AK coastline shapefile (/vector_data/polygon/boundaries/Alaska_Coast_Simplified_Polygon.shp) and executing a 100 km buffer operation in QGIS with default parameters (other than buffer distance). The results were then edited manually in QGIS to exclude those vertices located in Canada.
This PR exists because we've learned that the existing shapefile for cropping raster data to an Alaska extent are "too tight" meaning they'll exclude grid cells for coastal locations where the vector geometry slices through a grid cell - this is especially problematic for coarse grids (e.g., WRF and WRF derivations at 20 km per pixel) - and for small island locations that are not represented because they've been "simplified out" of the original coastline geometry.
This PR adds a new shapefile to the
polygon/boundariesdirectory that contains a 100 km dissolved buffer of the Alaskan coastline. The file was created by taking the existing AK coastline shapefile (/vector_data/polygon/boundaries/Alaska_Coast_Simplified_Polygon.shp) and executing a 100 km buffer operation in QGIS with default parameters (other than buffer distance). The results were then edited manually in QGIS to exclude those vertices located in Canada.This PR exists because we've learned that the existing shapefile for cropping raster data to an Alaska extent are "too tight" meaning they'll exclude grid cells for coastal locations where the vector geometry slices through a grid cell - this is especially problematic for coarse grids (e.g., WRF and WRF derivations at 20 km per pixel) - and for small island locations that are not represented because they've been "simplified out" of the original coastline geometry.