Consider switching to newer spatial thesauri

[aappling-usgs]

In a recent data review, @hcorson-dosch pointed out that FIPS codes have been withdrawn by NIST. See https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/itl/FIPSCodesReplacementChart2012.pdf and links below for details.

State/county codes (FIPS 5-2 and 6-4) have been replaced by INCITS 38 and 31 (although the Census continues to use the same codes and calls them the FIPSeries rather than FIPStandard now, says Wikipedia? not clearly communicated here, though). I tried to dig up those standards but they seem to be behind a paywall, which seems like a very strange way to do standards.

Country codes (FIPS 10-4) have been replaced by "Geopolitical Entities and Codes" or are pretty similar to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. GEC, ISO3166, and STANAG codes are all listed here.

A third option for a new thesaurus to switch to is the USGS Common geographic areas thesaurus, which also includes hydrologic units: https://apps.usgs.gov/thesaurus/thesaurus-full.php?thcode=1

[jordansread]

Good catch, and I know you mentioned this on one of my earlier data release reviews that you did, but I didn't digest the full context like you have here. Seems worthy of an update/rework, and probably is a pretty confined task at least within the current code.