County Level Annual Population Projections for SSP3 and SSP5

Abstract

This dataset consist of annual (2020-2100) county-level population projections for the United States (U.S.) for Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) 3 and 5. The original decadal state-level data is used as an input to the gridded population data model to downscale the state-level projections for each SSP to a 1 km grid. The 1 km data is then aggregated to the county-level using the 2020 TIGER/Line county shapefiles from the U.S. Census Bureau. The two data files are shared as .csv files with the following structure: Rows = Data for individual counties which are identified using their Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) code. The FIPS code is stored in the first column. Columns = Each year from 2020-2100 is an individual column. For easier reference, the state name associated with each row is stored in the last column. Values in each cell are the downscaled estimated population for that county-year combination. Values are fractional due to the weighting scheme used in the downscaling. The paper and model source code cited in the "Related Works" section describes the initial source of the population projections.