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
- 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
Author
European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts
-
Prudhomme, C.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1722-2497
- Maintenance and update frequency
- notPlanned Not planned
- GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
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- Hydrography
- Access constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- no limitations
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- 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
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- Inland waters
- Begin date
- 1891-01-01
- End date
- 2015-11-30
N
S
E
W
- Unique resource identifier
- OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
- Distribution format
-
-
Comma-separated values (CSV)
()
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Comma-separated values (CSV)
()
- OnLine resource
-
Supporting information
Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset
- OnLine resource
-
Download the data
Download a copy of this data
- 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/
Overviews
Spatial extent
N
S
E
W
Provided by
Associated resources
Not available
NERC Data Catalogue Service