Abstract
Abstract. The African continent is probably the one with the lowest density of hydrometric stations currently measuring river discharge despite the fact that the number of operating stations was quite important until the 1970s. This new African Database of Hydrometric Indices (ADHI) provides a wide range of hydrometric indices and hydrological signatures computed from different sources of data after a quality control. It includes 1466 stations with at least 10 years of daily discharge data over the period 1950–2018. The average record length is 33 years, and 131 stations have complete records over 50 years. With this new dataset spanning most climatic regions of the African continent, several hydrometric indices have been computed, representing mean flow characteristics and extremes (low flows and floods), and are accessible to the scientific community. The database will be updated on a regular basis to include more hydrometric stations and longer time series of river discharge. The ADHI is available for download at: https://doi.org/10.23708/LXGXQ9 (Tramblay and Rouché, 2020).
Highlights
African countries are largely underrepresented in largescale databases such as the Global Runoff Data Center (GRDC) or the recent GSIM initiative (Do et al, 2018; Gudmundsson et al, 2018), and/or the time series are mostly not updated
We introduce here the African Dataset of Hydrometric Indices (ADHI) that aims at giving access to an ensemble of hydrometric indices computed from an unprecedentedly large ensemble of stations with daily discharge data (Tramblay et al, 2020; Tramblay and Rouché, 2020)
This new hydrological database brings together the largest number of African river flow measurement stations in comparison with other previously published datasets. In this African Database of Hydrometric Indices (ADHI) dataset, we included a total of 1466 stations with at least 10 years of discharge data between 1950 and 2018 for a mean record length of 33.3 years
Summary
There is a growing need for large-scale streamflow archives (Addor et al, 2020; Hannah et al, 2011) that are extremely useful for evaluating continental land-surface simulations (Archfield et al, 2015; Newman et al, 2015; Ghiggi et al, 2019; Do et al, 2020) and remote sensing data products (Beck et al, 2017; Brocca et al, 2019; Forootan et al, 2019; Satgé et al, 2020), developing operational flood or drought monitoring systems (Alfieri et al, 2020; Harrigan et al, 2020; Lavers et al, 2019; Thiemig et al, 2011), and evaluating aquifer outflows and characteristics (Dewandel et al, 2003, 2004). There are strict conditions related to the redistribution of unprocessed data (Do et al, 2018), it is very often not possible to provide the complete time series of discharge data To address these challenges, the focus has been shifted to publishing hydrological indices and signatures, which are useful for characterizing the behavior of different components of river discharge, from low flows to annual runoff to floods (Addor et al, 2018; McMillan et al, 2017), and for assessing the potential impact of climate change and human activities on river regimes (Mahe et al, 2013). Useful information regarding the African rivers’ variability over the last 68 years can be shared with the international community while respecting the confidentiality of the original records when these are not allowed to be publicly shared by the national authorities
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