Large-sample datasets are essential in hydrological science to support modelling studies and advance process understanding. Caravan is a community initiative to create a large-sample hydrology dataset of meteorological forcing data, catchment attributes and discharge data for catchments around the world. This dataset is a subset of hydrological discharge data and station-based watersheds from the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC), which are covered by an open data policy.
The dataset covers stations from 5356 catchments and 25 countries and spans the years 1950–2023. Compared to the core version of Caravan, the extension takes the total number of Caravan catchments to be 22,372 (of which 1589 catchments are duplicates between the core and extensions). While in the core Caravan dataset mostly stations from North America, central Europe and South America were included, the new extension significantly improves the global coverage of the dataset with new stations across Europe, South America, South Africa, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition, the temporal extension of the time series could be significantly increased from 40–70 years. The extension strongly improves the global and temporal coverage of Caravan and represents a valuable dataset for global hydrological and climatological modelling studies. The dataset is released under a CC-BY-4.0 license that allows for redistribution and is publicly available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15349031.
Citation:
Färber, C., Plessow, H., Mischel, S. A., Kratzert, F., Addor, N., Shalev, G., and Looser, U.: GRDC-Caravan: extending Caravan with data from the Global Runoff Data Centre, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 17, 4613–4625, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-4613-2025, 2025.
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