CAMELS-FI: Hydrometeorology and landscape attributes for 320 catchments within Finland

CAMELS-FI (Catchment Attributes and MEteorology for Large-sample Studies FInland) is a dataset that combines and integrates multiple openly available dataset into one, consistent and easily usable, catchment oriented hydrological dataset. 

Features:

• daily discharge data of up to 63 years (1961-2023) for 320 gauges, of which 131 are unregulated, 26 have minor active regulation and 163 have major active regulation.
• catchments for those gauges
• daily meteorology for 10 different variables, averaged for the catchments (1961-2023)
• 78 static attributes, describing biogeophysical and societal variables averaged for the catchments and metadata for the gauges and catchments
• Land cover is also provided as annual timeseries, interpolated from all Corine Land Covers produced for Finland

Dataset publication describing the dataset and its development is available as a preprint. The article is under review to Earth System Science Data

The dataset folder also includes support document, that includes description, unit and original data source of all the present attributes along with some noteworthy aspects of the dataset. The support document is also downloadable separately.

CAMELS-FI follows CAMELS-CH and CAMELS-GB for selecting most of the attributes and naming conventions, and CAMELS-SE for soil attributes and lack of hydrolithological data (Coxon et al., 2020b; Höge et al., 2023; Teutschbein, 2024). The file names and directory structure of the data follow convention of CAMELS-GB in order to facilitate easier integration of CAMELS-FI to existing software that interfaces with CAMELS data.

Version 1.0.1:

•  fixed incorrect naming of virtual gauges in gauge layer of CAMELS_FI_catchment_boundaries.gpkg

Version 1.0.2:

• Added support document as a separately downloadable file
• Fixed description of high_q_dur in the support document.

Version 1.0.3:

• Fixed coordinates in metadata attributes to match the locations in CAMELS_FI_catchment_boundaries.gpkg
• Added link to preprint data publication to support document

Version 1.1.0:

• Replaced ERA5-Land potential evaporation with PET estimate of Singer et al. 2021 (called pet_singer). This was due to too high PE estimates of ERA5-Land
• As a result, the pet timeseries as well as climatic attributes pet_mean and aridity were updated. Pet timeseries values reduced in the late autumn, and as a consequence both pet_mean and aridity reduced considerably across almost all catchments.
• Climatic (static) attribute temperature_mean was renamed to temperature_mean_annual to avoid confusion with the timeseries that previously carried the same name.
• Added additional readme.txt to artificial-cross-catchment-bifurcations because this data is not common in a CAMELS - dataset

Version 1.1.1

• Removed baseflow_index_lfstat after a discussion with a reviewer, for further details see https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2025-578-RC1
• Renamed baseflow_index_ladson to baseflow_index
• Minor modifications to the support document