Mapping UGC or FIPS6 geocodes to polygons?

Question

I am looking to convert UGC or FIPS6 geocodes to polygons (or even rough lat/lng coordinates + radius). An example of the geocodes can be found here: http://alerts.weather.gov/cap/us.php?x=0

Anybody knows where I could find a mapping for these geocodes?

Answer 1

The data used by the NWS can be found here: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/geodata/

In order to actually get the coordinates from the data, I used the program OpenJump to save the data in the CSV format.

Answer 2

Updated Answer for June 2019

The NWS Public Forecast Zones can be downloaded as a shapefile from https://www.weather.gov/gis/PublicZones

I used QGIS to convert the shapefile to WGS84 (EPSG:4326) and exported to CSV using WKT geometry. That resulted in a 122MB CSV file.

Instructions for Windows QGIS 3.4.3

1. Download and extract z_02ap19.zip
2. In QGIS, Layer -> Add Layer -> Add Vector Layer... (or press Ctrl+Shift+V)
3. Source Type = File, Encoding = System, Vector Dataset(s) = z_02ap19.shp extracted eariler. Then click Add.
4. Result
5. [Optional] Right click the layer, Set CRS -> Set Layer CRS... and set the CRS to EPSG:4326.
6. Right click the layer, Export -> Save Feature As...
7. Format = Comma Separated Value [CSV]
8. Choose a file location.
9. Choose an encoding, usually System or UTF-8.
10. Uncheck "Add saved file to map"
11. Make sure all fields are selected
12. Geometry type should be Automatic (They all end up as Polygons)
13. Layer Options:
    • CREATE_CSVT = YES (Creates a single file that describes the field types, useful for re-importing the file back into other GIS programs)
    • GEOMETRY = AS_WKT
    • LINEFORMAT = CRLF (Windows) or LF (Unix), historically, but most programs now can handle both
    • SEPARATOR = COMMA (Up to you)
    • STRING_QUOTING = ALWAYS (Likely doesn't matter as the data won't contain quotes anyways)
    • WRITE_BOM = NO (Byte-order mark, up to you)
14. Click OK, and QGIS will generated the file which takes several seconds.