Estimating the presence of paved surface parking lots in the conterminous U.S. from land-use coefficients for 1974, 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2012

Parking lots may be a significant source of pollution. Oil, sediments, and heavy metals may accumulate on their surface, then be flushed into rivers, streams, and lakes via rainfall. At present no dataset provides a mapping or estimation of parking lot area or locations nationwide. This product consists of a time series of five national 60-meter raster datasets which estimate the proportion of each pixel represented by parking lots, based on land-use coefficients. The rasters span the conterminous United States, for the years 1974, 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2012. The dataset was derived by calculating coefficients for 18 land-use types (Commercial, Industrial, Residential, Recreation, and so on) from the 2012 U.S. Geological Survey NAWQA [...]