Abstract
Abstract. We present a new data set of attributes for 671 catchments in the contiguous United States (CONUS) minimally impacted by human activities. This complements the daily time series of meteorological forcing and streamflow provided by Newman et al. (2015b). To produce this extension, we synthesized diverse and complementary data sets to describe six main classes of attributes at the catchment scale: topography, climate, streamflow, land cover, soil, and geology. The spatial variations among basins over the CONUS are discussed and compared using a series of maps. The large number of catchments, combined with the diversity of the attributes we extracted, makes this new data set well suited for large-sample studies and comparative hydrology. In comparison to the similar Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX) data set, this data set relies on more recent data, it covers a wider range of attributes, and its catchments are more evenly distributed across the CONUS. This study also involves assessments of the limitations of the source data sets used to compute catchment attributes, as well as detailed descriptions of how the attributes were computed. The hydrometeorological time series provided by Newman et al. (2015b, https://doi.org/10.5065/D6MW2F4D) together with the catchment attributes introduced in this paper (https://doi.org/10.5065/D6G73C3Q) constitute the freely available CAMELS data set, which stands for Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies.
Highlights
Catchment attributes are descriptors of the landscape
Elevation obviously exerts a key control on catchment behavior (Fig. 1a), as it strongly influences a wide range of catchment attributes that we present in this paper, such as soil depth, land cover, the fraction of the precipitation falling as snow, or streamflow seasonality
We considered two key indicators of vegetation density: the leaf area index (LAI) and the green vegetation fraction (GVF), which approximates the vertical and horizontal density of vegetation, respectively
Summary
Catchment attributes are descriptors of the landscape. Their interplay shapes catchment behavior by influencing how catchments store and transfer water. N15 covers 671 catchment in the contiguous USA (CONUS), for which it provides daily meteorological forcing from three data sets, Daymet (Thornton et al, 2012), Maurer (Maurer et al, 2002), and NLDAS (Xia et al, 2012), as well as daily streamflow measurements from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). We cover the same catchments and provide additional quantitative estimates of a wide range of catchment attributes We named this extended N15 data set the CAMELS data set, which stands for Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies. These six sections are organized using the following structure. The upscaling was done using the arithmetic mean, except where indicated otherwise
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