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I have one ArcGIS shapefile of my river basin consisting of many subbasin. Another shapefile showing the location of gridded points over the whole basin (Its latitude and longitude are used as file name of corresponding data file). I'd like to distribute that gridded data corresponding to each subwatershed. Basically, the idea is to know which gridded points belong to which subbasin either inside the boundary or within a certain limit from the boundary. Anybody has an idea how to do this? Thank you very much!

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Can you clarify the geometry types of your layers? I'm assuming the gridded points are points and the river basin is a line or a polygon. – R.K. Dec 3 '12 at 12:40
What's the purpose of the points? If it's simply to represent subbasin's as points then I would convert your subbasin dataset from polygon to point (assuming they are polygons). This conversion will retain attributes from the converted dataset. But I guess this will only suit you if all you're looking to do is simply represent subbasin's as points and your current point file has no special purpose. – dchaboya Dec 3 '12 at 13:32
Thank R.K & dchaboya. The river basin is a polygon. The current point feature represent the places where I have the data – samphilips Dec 4 '12 at 3:35

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What you want is a spatial join. It allows you to combine information from different tables by using spatial relationships as the join key, in this case, the river basin and gridded points. What it will do is transfer attributes from your river sub-basin to your points. That way, your points would now have a sub-basin attribute. You'd know which sub-basin it belongs to.

You can do it using the Spatial Join function of the Analysis toolbox.

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Thanks R.K. It works perfectly! – samphilips Dec 4 '12 at 3:35
Glad to be of help :) – R.K. Dec 4 '12 at 4:04
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I would recommend using ArcGIS overlay tools. Specifically, Intersect should work well for you if you want to assign the basin ID to your point data.

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This trick does the job I need. Thanks Aaron! – samphilips Dec 4 '12 at 3:36

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