Abstract
Abstract. We present the first large-sample catchment hydrology dataset for Great Britain, CAMELS-GB (Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies). CAMELS-GB collates river flows, catchment attributes and catchment boundaries from the UK National River Flow Archive together with a suite of new meteorological time series and catchment attributes. These data are provided for 671 catchments that cover a wide range of climatic, hydrological, landscape, and human management characteristics across Great Britain. Daily time series covering 1970–2015 (a period including several hydrological extreme events) are provided for a range of hydro-meteorological variables including rainfall, potential evapotranspiration, temperature, radiation, humidity, and river flow. A comprehensive set of catchment attributes is quantified including topography, climate, hydrology, land cover, soils, and hydrogeology. Importantly, we also derive human management attributes (including attributes summarising abstractions, returns, and reservoir capacity in each catchment), as well as attributes describing the quality of the flow data including the first set of discharge uncertainty estimates (provided at multiple flow quantiles) for Great Britain. CAMELS-GB (Coxon et al., 2020; available at https://doi.org/10.5285/8344e4f3-d2ea-44f5-8afa-86d2987543a9) is intended for the community as a publicly available, easily accessible dataset to use in a wide range of environmental and modelling analyses.
Highlights
Data underpin our knowledge of the hydrological system
We focused on providing quantitative data of human impacts in CAMELS-GB; it is important to note that additional datasets are available that qualitatively characterise human impacts in GB including the Factors Affecting Runoff (FAR) codes available from the National River Flow Archive (NRFA)
This study introduces the first large-sample, open-source catchment dataset for Great Britain, CAMELS-GB (Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies), consisting of hydro-meteorological catchment time series, catchment attributes, and catchment boundaries for 671 catchments
Summary
Data underpin our knowledge of the hydrological system. They advance our understanding of water dynamics over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and are the foundation for water resource planning and regulation. In Great Britain, there is a wide availability of gridded, open-source datasets and free access to quality-controlled river flow data via the UK National River Flow Archive (NRFA). While this is a large resource of open data by international standards, these datasets have not yet been combined and processed over a consistent set of catchments and made publicly available in a single location. We provide a comprehensive description of all data contained within CAMELS-GB including (1) its source data, (2) how the time series and attributes were produced, and (3) a discussion of the associated limitations
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