National Weather Service ‘political’ boundaries

Describing the various ‘political’ boundaries used across the Weather Service

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Weather Service Socio-political Boundaries

The weather service uses the following sets of domains pretty routinely. As opposed to boundaries dictated by weather and climate, these are also guided by societal (sociopolitical) boundaries that define them.

Common accronyms

Acronym	Longform	Definition
FIM	Flood Inundation Mapping
FIM	Flood Inundation Modeling
HUC	Hydrologic Unit Code
RPU	Raster Processing Unit
VPU	Vector Processing Unit
WFO	Weather Forecast Offices
NOAA	National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
NWS	National Weather Service
OWP	Office of Water Prediction

Maps

Related:

• VPU’s are used as national scale ‘physical’ boundaries and the hydrofabric defines the physiographic model views.
• TIGER is the geographic definition to which the census data reports, and loosely conforms to aggregations of these bounds.