Geographic Density Heat Map

[newnoise]

Is it possible to make a map like the one below in SAS? I can't find any examples of such a map online nor any SUGI proceedings on it.

Looks like it'd be a contour plot by coordinates overlaid on a projected map. But how do you go about doing that? Is it possible?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ballardw]

Here's a link with one form. though the data is precipitation the principal could be the same: http://robslink.com/SAS/democd82/precipitation_map_10inches_info.htm

And here's one using smaller regular filled circles to simulate a larger area

http://robslink.com/SAS/democd75/solar_potential_map_info.htm

Explore Robslink.com for many examples of graphs and maps.

[Rick_SAS · Accepted solution]

See the paper and references in

Massengill and Kolovos (2012) "Together at last: Spatial analysis and SAS mapping"

[newnoise]

This is great! Thanks for passing along!

[Darrell_sas]

Basically, there are 2 ways to do it and neither are easy without the proper data.

First, there is making the heat map with annotate.  You have to draw the heat map in the correct locations.  The examples that Ballardw and Rick suggested are using annotate.

Second, there is a counties map.   If you have the data per county, you can do something like this weather map:

[newnoise]

Thanks for the suggestion! We have county-level data, but I didn't want the unit of analysis to be county, as they can be rather large, particularly out west. I wanted to be able to use our point-level coordinates to get densities around specific areas, regardless of state or county lines. I think the Massengill and Kolovos (2012) paper gets me where I want to go. It's not simple, but it looks like it'd get the job done.

[ballardw]

You don't mention what the heat map is actually intended to display. Please note that in those "big counties out west", since I work with such data, that many interpolations across those areas can be extremely misleading. In some cases related to characteristics of people because there are no people resident in the area and for phyiscal characteristics such as weather phenomena that elevation often has a large influence on results.