GIS Rasterize Vector Data "requires numeric data"

What is your goal? It looks like what you loaded contains traces for a contour plot. You have already superposed those contours on top of a map of the US.

Unfortunately, the fellow that wrote the GIS package is no longer with WaveMetrics, so we may have to learn along with you :)

Is the .shp file too large to post? You could share it with WaveMetrics support via DropBox or similar. If we can't figure out the answer to your problems here, you may need to move this to support@wavemetrics.com.

My motivation for the raster is so I can assign colors and labels to each contour individually, creating a display similar to the last image in the DisplayHelpTopic "IgorGIS Package" > IgorGIS Tutorial: Rasterizing Vector Data (the example about geography of the US). Eventually, I will need to create several layers of concentration data for different altitudes at the same XY coordinates.

The .shp file is small (12 KB), but the forum doesn't support the file type. I can email it or transfer it by other means if necessary. 

I take it that the vector data you want is the same as that which made the horseshoe-shaped contours. That pretty has to be numeric data, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Since GISRasterizeVectorData requires a fieldname input, is there a chance that you used to wrong name there? I suppose there may also be the possibility that the error message is simply not being helpful. I presume you used the same GISFileHandle as you did to load the data originally.

Another possibility- if the raw concentration data is available, you could make the contour plot with Igor instead of by loading the contours from the .shp file. Is that at all possible?

Sorry for the delayed response. The horseshoe shaped contours are the vector data I want rasterized. They are easy to display by plotting W_geometries[1] vs W_Geometries[0], but then I have no way to display which contour band corresponds to which concentration. I will look further into raw HYSPLIT  concentration data, but the output formats are very limited.

I am trying to use the following command. The issue is that the CONC wave is listed as a string in W_AttributeNames, even though all the values are integers. I am using the same GISFileHandle (ConcHandle) as I did to load the data originally.

GISRasterizeVectorData /D=root:HYSPLIT:fireData ConcHandle, "CONC"

Let's do this as a tech support incident- send an e-mail to support@wavemetrics.com and attach a copy of the .shp file. In that message, it would be handy if you could repeat some of what you posted here, especially including the GIS commands you have used to load the data and that you attempted to use for rasterizing.