Hydrologic and meteorologic extremes and transitions for 4299 catchments in Europe

Authors: Manuela Brunner, Bailey Anderson
Owners: Manuela Brunner
Last update: 25.06.2025

This dataset provides the data needed to reproduce the results by Brunner et al. 2025, ERL: 'Meteorological and hydrological dry-to-wet transition events are only weakly related over European catchments'. Namely, catchment shapefiles and attributes of 4299 catchments in Europe and extracted hydrologic (floods/droughts) and meteorologic extreme events (wet and dry spells) as well as their transitions.
It relies on a large-sample dataset of daily hydrological observations and catchment shapefiles compiled for 24 countries in Europe by collecting data from national agencies and existing large-sample datasets including the Global Runoff Database (GRDC, 2019), EStreams (Nascimento et al. 2024), and two datasets from the Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-sample Studies (CAMELS; Addor et al. 2017) suite, namely, CAMELS-CH (Höge et al. 2023) and CAMELS-DE (Loritz et al. 2024) (see Table 1 in the Supplementary Information for an overview and data sources). 

Dataset components:

(1) Shapefile of 4299 catchments in Europe: catchments.shp
gauge_d: gauge ID 
country: country
dataset: data source
gaug_lt: gauge latitude
gaug_ln: gauge longitude
area: catchment area (km2)
elev: catchment mean elevation (m.a.s.l.)
eon_rt: elongation ratio (-)
mean_P: mean daily precipitation (mm/d)
hgh_pr: high precipitation fraction (-)
lw_prc: low precipitation fraction (-)
mean_T: mean daily temperature (°C)
men_PET: mean potential evapotranspiration (mm/d)
aridity: aridity index (-)
frc_snw: fraction of snow (-)
rnff_rt: runoff ratio (-)
elstcty: elasticity (-)
slp_FDC: slope of the flow duration curve (-)
BFI: baseflow index

(2) Extracted hydrologic extremes (floods and droughts) for the 4299 catchments for the period 1981-2020: folder: events_q_1981_2020_revised_pooling.zip
One file per catchment: country_gauge_d_Q_event_indices_fp_04_dt_03.csv
last_date: end date of event (YYYY-MM-DD)
first_date: first date of event (YYYY-MM-DD)
event duration: event duration (days)
cum_deficit: cumulative deficit for drought, volume for floods (m3/event)
max_deficit: maximum deficit (m3/s)
Qmin: minimum flow for drought, maximum flow for floods (m3/s)
class: event type (drought/flood)
time_since_previous_event: time since previous extreme event (days)
transition: label indicating 'independent' and 'transition' events
transition_type: distinguishing not transitions ('independent') from 'seasonal' and 'rapid' transitions
event_group: event groups, highlighting, which events belong to a specific transition event

(3) Extracted meteorologic extremes (wet and dry spells) for the 4299 catchments for the period 1981-2020: folder: events_p_1981_2020_revised_pooling.zip
One file per catchment: country_gauge_d_P_event_indices_fp_04_dt_03.csv
last_date: end date of event (YYYY-MM-DD)
first_date: first date of event (YYYY-MM-DD)
event duration: event duration (days)
cum_deficit: cumulative deficit for dry spell, volume for wet spells (m3/event)
max_deficit: maximum deficit (m3/s)
Qmin: minimum flow for dry spells, maximum flow for wet spells (m3/s)
class: event type (drought/flood)
time_since_previous_event: time since previous extreme event (days)
transition: label indicating 'independent' and 'transition' events
transition_type: distinguishing not transitions ('independent') from 'seasonal' and 'rapid' transitions
event_group: event groups, highlighting, which events belong to a specific transition event


Related publications: 
- Addor, N., A. J. Newman, N. Mizukami, and M. P. Clark (2017), The CAMELS data set: Catchment attributes and meteorology for large-sample studies, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 21 (10), 5293–5313, doi:10.5194/hess-21-5293-2017.
- Brunner et al. (2025), Meteorological and hydrological dry-to-wet transition events are only weakly related over European catchments, Environmental Research Letters
- GRDC (2019), Global runoff data centre.
- Höge, M., M. Kauzlaric, R. Siber, U. Schönenberger, P. Horton, J. Schwanbeck, M. G. Floriancic, D. Viviroli, S. Wilhelm, A. E. Sikorska-Senoner, N. Addor, M. Brunner, S. Pool, M. Zappa, and F. Fenicia (2023), CAMELS-CH: hydro-meteorological time series and landscape attributes for 331 catchments in hydrologic Switzerland, Earth System Science Data, 15 (12), 5755–5784, doi: 10.5194/essd-15-5755-2023.
- Loritz, R., A. Dolich, E. Acuña Espinoza, P. Ebeling, B. Guse, J. Götte, S. K. Hassler, C. Hauffe,
I. Heidbüchel, J. Kiesel, M. Mälicke, H. Müller-Thomy, M. Stölzle, and L. Tarasova (2024), CAMELS-DE: hydro-meteorological time series and attributes for 1555 catchments in Germany, Earth System Science Data Discussions, pp. 1–30, doi:10.5194/essd-2024-318.
- Nascimento, T. V. M. d., J. Rudlang, M. Höge, R. v. d. Ent, M. Chappon, J. Seibert, M. Hrachowitz, and F. Fenicia (2024), EStreams: An integrated dataset and catalogue of streamflow, hydro-climatic variables and landscape descriptors for Europe, EarthArXiv, p. under review.