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Historic reconstructions of daily river flow for 303 UK catchments (1891-2015)

This dataset is model output from the GR4J lumped catchment hydrology model. It provides 500 model realisations of daily river flow, in cubic metres per second (cumecs, m3/s), for 303 UK catchments for the period between 1891-2015. The modelled catchments are part of the National River Flow Archive (NRFA) (https://nrfa.ceh.ac.uk/) and provide good spatial coverage across the UK. These flow reconstructions were produced as part of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) funded Historic Droughts and IMPETUS projects, to provide consistent modelled daily flow data across the UK from 1891-2015, with estimates of uncertainty. This dataset is an outcome of the Historic Droughts Project (grant number: NE/L01016X/1). The data are provided in two formats to help the user account for uncertainty: (1) a 500-member ensemble of daily river flow time series for each catchment, with their corresponding model parameters and evaluation metric scores of model performance. (2) a single river flow time series (one corresponding to the top run of the 500), with the maximum and minimum daily limits of the 500 ensemble members. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/f710bed1-e564-47bf-b82c-4c2a2fe2810e

Simple

Date (Publication)
2018-03-12
Date (Creation)
2018-02-23
Identifier
https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/f710bed1-e564-47bf-b82c-4c2a2fe2810e
Identifier
doi: / 10.5285/f710bed1-e564-47bf-b82c-4c2a2fe2810e
Other citation details
Smith, K.A., Tanguy, M., Hannaford, J., Prudhomme, C. (2018). Historic reconstructions of daily river flow for 303 UK catchments (1891-2015). NERC Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/f710bed1-e564-47bf-b82c-4c2a2fe2810e
Point of contact
  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Smith, K.
Author
  Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Smith, K.A.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1060-9103
Author
  Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Tanguy, M.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1516-6834
Author
  Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Hannaford, J.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5256-3310
Author
  European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts - Prudhomme, C.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1722-2497
Custodian
  NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Publisher
  NERC Environmental Information Data Centre
Owner
  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Maintenance and update frequency
notPlanned Not planned
GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
  • Hydrography
Access constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
no limitations
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
This resource is made available under the terms of the Open Government Licence
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
© UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
If you reuse this data, you should cite: Smith, K.A., Tanguy, M., Hannaford, J., Prudhomme, C. (2018). Historic reconstructions of daily river flow for 303 UK catchments (1891-2015). NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/f710bed1-e564-47bf-b82c-4c2a2fe2810e
Spatial representation type
textTable Text, table
Distance
100  urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001
Metadata language
EnglishEnglish
Character set
utf8 UTF8
Topic category
  • Inland waters
Begin date
1891-01-01
End date
2015-11-30
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Unique resource identifier
OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
Distribution format
  • Comma-separated values (CSV) ()

Distributor
  NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
OnLine resource
Supporting information

Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset

OnLine resource
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Hierarchy level
dataset Dataset
Other
dataset

Conformance result

Date (Publication)
2010-12-08
Statement
The GR4J model (v 1.0.2) was run over the calibration period (1982-2014) using 500,000 Latin Hypercube Sampled model parameter sets. These model parameters were assessed against observations from the National River Flow Archive (NRFA). For two catchments (the Thames at Kingston, and the Lea at Feildes Weir) the model was also calibrated against naturalised flows. The model was calibrated using a multi-objective approach comprising of 6 evaluation metrics: Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE), NSE on log flows (log NSE), Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE), Absolute Percent Bias (PBIAS), Absolute Percent Error in Mean Annual Minimum flows over a 30 day accumulation period (MAM30), and Absolute Percent Error in the flow exceeded 95% of the time (Q95). The 500,000 model runs were then ranked by each evaluation metric, the ranks were summed, and the runs were reordered according to this final rank. Finally, in order to prevent uneven trade-offs between metrics, the runs were re-ordered according to thresholds of acceptability. Reconstructed flow timeseries were then run for the top 500 ranking model parameter sets, using PET (Potential Evapotranspiration) (Tanguy et al., 2017: doi https://doi.org/10.5285/17b9c4f7-1c30-4b6f-b2fe-f7780159939c ), and reconstructed daily rainfall data, provided by the UK Met Office. The modelled data, and the supporting metadata files, were exported from the R software programme as comma separated value files (.csv), and ingested into the EIDC in this format.
File identifier
f710bed1-e564-47bf-b82c-4c2a2fe2810e XML
Metadata language
EnglishEnglish
Character set
ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin 1) 8859 Part 1
Hierarchy level
dataset Dataset
Hierarchy level name
dataset
Date stamp
2025-08-01T10:27:54
Metadata standard name
UK GEMINI
Metadata standard version
2.3
Point of contact
  NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg , Lancaster , LA1 4AP , UK
https://eidc.ac.uk/
 
 

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Spatial extent

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Keywords

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
Hydrography

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