Large-sample datasets are essential in hydrological science to support modelling studies and global assessments. Caravan is an open community dataset of meteorological forcing data, catchment attributes, and discharge data for catchments around the world1. Additionally, Caravan provides code to derive meteorological forcing data and catchment attributes in the cloud, making it easy for anyone to extend Caravan to new catchments. The vision of Caravan is to provide the foundation for a truly global open source community resource that will grow over time.
Together with the developers of Caravan, GRDC has published an extension to the original dataset2. The extension includes a subset of those hydrological discharge data and station-based watersheds from the Global Runoff Database, 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 - 2023. An accompanying paper to the dataset is in preparation.
Link to the dataset:
https://zenodo.org/records/8425587
References:
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
2Färber, C., Plessow, H., Kratzert, F., Addor, N., Shalev, G., & Looser, U. (2023). GRDC-Caravan: extending the original dataset with data from the Global Runoff Data Centre (0.1) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8425587
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