Time series of daily and/or monthly river discharge data of more than 9200 stations from 160 countries, comprising around 390,000 station-years with an average time series length of about 42 years. The earliest daily data are from the year 1806, the most recent from the year 2016.
Large-sample datasets are essential in hydrological science to support modelling studies and global assessments. This dataset is an extension to Caravan, a global community dataset of meteorological forcing data, catchment attributes, and discharge data for catchments around the world (Kratzert et al. 20231). The extension includes a subset of those hydrological discharge data and station-based watersheds from the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC), which are covered by an open data policy (Attribution 4.0 International; CC BY 4.0). In total, the dataset covers stations from 5357 catchments and 25 countries worldwide with a time series record from 1950 – 2022. GRDC is an international data centre operating under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) at the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG). Established in 1988, it holds the most substantive collection of quality assured river discharge data worldwide. Primary providers of river discharge data and associated metadata are the National Hydrological and Hydro-Meteorological Services of WMO Member States. 1Kratzert, F., Nearing, G., Addor, N. et al. Caravan - A global community dataset for large-sample hydrology. Sci Data 10, 61 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-01975-w
The GRDC Freshwater Fluxes into the World’s Oceans is a web application provided by the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) to present the Freshwater Fluxes into the World’s Oceans data product. Continental freshwater input into the oceans is computed by the GRDC at irregular intervals, most recently in December 2020 referencing the time period 1901–2016. Previous data sets prepared in 2004, 2009 and 2014 are integrated into the service.
Abstract
The Global Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (GTN-R) is a component of the Global Terrestrial Network - Hydrology (GTN-H) supported by Global Climate Observing system (GCOS) and the Hydrology and Water Resources Programme of the WMO (HWRP). The basic idea of the GTN-R project is to draw together the already available real-time discharge data provided by the National Hydrological Services (NHS) and to redistribute it in a standardised way. Core component is the GCOS Baseline River Network of gauging stations located near to the mouth of the World's major rivers. In cooperation with the Hydrological Services of the WMO Member States this network is constantly being extended by confirmation of additional stations. The GCOS Baseline River Network is a project in progress with a current status as of December 2014 of 245 gauging stations worldwide. GRDC contributes to the GTN-H by the collection of river discharge data of these so-called GTN-R stations. As a first step, the data of daily river discharge at the GRDC stations corresponding to the GCOS Baseline River Network are provided to the public via the Geoportal of the German Federal Institute for Hydrology (BfG) using a standard Sensor Observation Service (SOS). The provision via the GEOSS Portal is intended (further details will be communicated in due time):
The Long-Term Mean Monthly Discharges and Annual Characteristics offer basic statistics of all stations being represented in the Global Runoff Database: - annual means, lowest, and highest monthly discharges for individual years, - long-term mean, lowest, and highest monthly discharges of time series with at least five years of observation each with at least ten monthly values, - long-term inner-annual mean, lowest and highest monthly discharges of time series with at least five values of a specific month, and their standard deviations. The monthly primary values are provided station by station as ASCII-text files, named with pvm-prefix and station numbers. For download, all files are grouped by WMO Regions. Please note, that statistics are only provided for timeseries of daily discharge values from years with less than ten months and months with less than ten days missing.