River flows and nutrient discharges to the Atlantic ocean basin

This dataset includes i) River flows and ii) nutrient discharges to the Atlantic ocean basin:

River flow data are a subset of the WaterGAP 2.2d model (Monthly data on a 0.5° x 0.5° grid between 90°N and 60°S. 1901–2016) (Müller Schmied et al. 2020)

The original watergap2.2d data is provided in netcdf format. Our postprocessing includes the selection of the coastal cells and the extraction of the monthly values in these cells. The resulting dataset is provided as a shapefile (Global_YearMonthly_River_flow_watermap22_coast.shp), including Date, latitude and longitude of the coastal cell’s centroids and the discharge values (m3s-1).

Watergap2.2d outputs offers a very good spatio-temporal extent and resolution, and according to the Müller Schmied et al. 2020, the validation results for streamflow (or discharges values) are reasonably satisfactory, although there is some spatial variability in the performance results. Moreover, the recently published “Global Freshwater Fluxes into the World's Oceans (GRDC, 2021)” product and paper, uses the yearly outcomes of this model, which has also supported our selection.

River nutrient discharges are a subset of observations from the “Global River Water Quality Archive”. (Virro et al, 2021), that among the publicly available and downloadable datasets, gathers the highest number of observations as includes data from different international and national databases.

The GRQA data is provided as csv files (one file for each nutrient). These files have been processed to subset only observations at stations near the coastline. To do this a intersection between station locations and a buffer of 0.2 degrees around the coastline has been made. For each nutrient, a shapefile with the subsetted observations is provided.

All shapefiles provided are accompanied by a “.qmd” file that includes metadata information in QGIS 3 format.