DOI: 10.5285/8344e4f3-d2ea-44f5-8afa-86d2987543a9
title: Catchment attributes and hydro-meteorological timeseries for 671 catchments across Great Britain (CAMELS-GB)

description: This dataset provides hydro-meteorological timeseries and landscape attributes for 671 catchments across Great Britain. It collates river flows, catchment attributes and catchment boundaries from the UK National River Flow Archive together with a suite of new meteorological timeseries and catchment attributes. Daily timeseries for the time period 1st October 1970 to the 30th September 2015 are provided for a range of hydro-meteorological data (including rainfall, potential evapotranspiration, temperature, radiation, humidity and flow). A comprehensive set of catchment attributes are quantified describing a range of catchment characteristics including topography, climate, hydrology, land cover, soils, hydrogeology, human influences and discharge uncertainty. 

This dataset is intended for the community as a freely available, easily accessible dataset to use in a wide range of environmental data and modelling analyses. A research paper (Coxon et al, CAMELS-GB: Hydrometeorological time series and landscape attributes for 671 catchments in Great Britain) describing the dataset in detail will be made available in Earth System Science Data (https://www.earth-system-science-data.net/).
description: CAMELS-GB provides hydro-meteorological timeseries and catchment attributes for 671 catchments. 
Catchment meteorological timeseries are derived from CEH-GEAR, CHESS-PE and CHESS-MET. Catchment flow timeseries and boundaries are sourced from the UK National River Flow Archive. 

Many of the catchment attributes are sourced either from the National River Flow Archive or from the catchment meteorological timeseries produced in CAMELS-GB. Land cover catchment attributes are derived from the GB 1km percentage target class, Land Cover Map 2015 (Rowland et al, 2017; https://doi.org/10.5285/ee9ab43d-a4fe-4e73-afd5-cd4fc4c82556). Soil catchment attributes are derived from the European Soil Database Derived Data product (Hiederer, 2013a, 2013b), and the modelled depth to bedrock global product (Pelletier et al., 2016). Hydrogeology catchment attributes are derived from the British Geological Survey hydrogeology map (BGS, 2019) and superficial deposits map. Discharge uncertainty estimates for each catchment are derived using the method described in Coxon et al (2015). Human influence catchment attributes were derived from datasets describing ground/surface water abstractions and discharges sourced from the Environment Agency and from datasets describing reservoir capacity and use from the UK reservoir inventory (Durant and Counsell, 2018).

Where possible we have provided quantitative estimates of uncertainty, including timeseries for two potential evapo-transpiration products, percentiles of soil catchment attributes and the first set of national discharge uncertainty estimates. For all datasets we have highlighted the key uncertainties and limitations of the underlying source data products and any methods used to derive the catchment attributes. We hope to raise awareness and encourage users of the dataset to consider these uncertainties in their analyses. 

See supporting information for more details.