Urbanisation is the runoff and infiltration relevant surface parameter most quickly changing. The general pattern is, that the larger a town, the faster its spatial growth.
For Jordan, urbanisation has been demarkated for the years
Urbanisation as GIS shapefile distinguishes between 2 classes:
Please note, that non-urbanised areas have the attribute "0" and not NULL! This is important for subsequent grid operations, as cells with no data would always result in NULL in any Grid Math operations such as combining with land use.
The transformation of the shape file into an ESRI grid is explained in the preparation of grid files.
The resulting surfer grid has the filename urbgrd.grd and is stored in the system data directory as indicated in the configuration file.
Overlay of landuse and urbanisations (vector layers shown)