I am working with the block-group level Tiger geodatabase from the US Census Bureau. What I wanted to do was convert the polygons into 10x10mi raster cells. I have multiple rasters for several different Census variables. My question is if there is a more efficient process to what I am doing today. I need the cells to be uniform because the Census rasters are being combined with other rasters. So first I created a Fishnet Grid over the US. I then perform a Spatial Join with the fishnet layer & the census layer taking the average of the values because one cell could contain more than one block-group polygon. Once joined, I run Polygon to Raster with the same cell-size to output a series of rasters all with identically shaped & positioned raster cells. The Spatial Join process takes the longest so I'm wondering if someone has a more efficient approach to this problem.
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