RivEx is a crosscutting initiative of the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) project under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). Its goal is to advance our understanding of rivers, which are among the most renewable and accessible freshwater resource on Earth. Although it is well known that freshwater is essential for life and society, there are surprising gaps in our knowledge regarding how much water is flowing through the world’s rivers and how this changes over time.
The RivEx initiative brings together a diverse, international community of scientists to create a common framework for comparing and improving river models. The goal is to transform cutting-edge global science into actionable knowledge that local communities worldwide can benefit from. The initiative relies on both in-situ measurements and satellite observations, combining decades of ground-based river monitoring with modern remote sensing technologies such as various satellite missions.
Since the project’s inception in 2025, GRDC has been an active partner in RivEx. As a key contribution to model calibration and validation, GRDC provides daily discharge time series from approximately 5,300 gauging stations worldwide. Only stations with a time series end between 2020 and 2025 are included, in order to provide a dataset with the most up-to-date information possible.
Project website:
https://www.gewex.org/river-experiment-initiative/
Preview of stations:
You can access the data by downloading the station catalogue below, copy the GRDC station name(s) or number(s) and paste them into the field “Station Name or Number” in the filter menu of the data portal. A step by step guide is provided in our the Navigation guide for GRDC data portal (available in English and Spanish).
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| Station Catalogue (XLSX, 61KB) |