How to join thousands of rows (date data) from a CSV to a small amount of rows (location county data) in Arc Map Pro

Question

I'm not sure I am asking the question correctly, so I will describe my situation. I have a polygon boundary layer with 64 Colorado counties. I also have a CSV with roughly a thousand (1,000) rows that describe drought data for each county along with dates. So it shows changes in drought conditions per county by year from 2000-2019. I would like to show on a map changes in drought conditions as time progresses, and I can do this by geocoding the table, symbolizing the point centroids with graduated colors, and then using the time slider feature in ArcMap Pro. However, because I am using geocoding, these depicts points, but I would prefer to show the county polygons with colors. I am having trouble because since there is only 64 counties, and 1,000+ records, I cannot use the join tool. Is there another way to join, or combine all my data with the polygon shapefiles so I can depict change in drought conditions by colors of polygons (instead of points centroids)?

Thanks!

JoshuaBixby · Answer

Have you read How time is supported in spatial data—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop  and Temporal data in separate tables—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop ?

AdrianWelsh · Answer

Yeah, I had a feeling that was going to happen. Ok, I think the best tool to use is:

Make Query Table. This should make a table/layer based on your features and your data table. You can then export the table to a feature class and it should be solid.

I haven't tried this but I want to with real data...

To see a representation somewhat, there is better documentation in the ArcMap article instead of Pro:

Examples of queries with the Make Query Table tool—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop

Try that and I think it should solve your problem.

MatthewKatz · Answer

I have geocoded the points and have utilized a spatial join. It seems to only have data from one year or one set of values because when I use the time slider, all the data is absent besides for the last year,