Abstract

Advances in open data science serve large-scale model developments and, subsequently, hydroclimate services. Local river flow observations are key in hydrology but data sharing remains limited due to unclear quality, or to political, economic or infrastructure reasons. This paper provides methods for quality checking openly accessible river-flow time series. Availability, outliers, homogeneity and trends were assessed in 21 586 time series from 13 data providers worldwide. We found a decrease in data availability since the 1980s, scarce open information in southern Asia, the Middle East and North and Central Africa, and significant river-flow trends in Africa, Australia, southwest Europe and Southeast Asia. We distinguish numerical outliers from high-flow peaks, and integrate all investigated quality characteristics in a composite indicator. We stress the need to maintain existing gauging networks, and highlight opportunities in extending existing global databases, understanding drivers for trends and inhomogeneity, and in innovative acquisition methods in data-scarce regions.

Keywords

open data; river flow; global hydrology; quality control; time series

Published in

Hydrological Sciences Journal
2020, Volume: 65, number: 5, pages: 699-711
Publisher: TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD

UKÄ Subject classification

Oceanography, Hydrology, Water Resources


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2019.1659509

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/117308