A 2-minute rainfall (12 locations) and discharge time series at the Vallon de Nant catchment, Switzerland, for 2017 and 2018 summer seasons

The data set contains rainfall time series within the experimental 13.4 km² Vallon de Nant catchment, Switzerland (Michelon et al., 2020), from June 30th to October 4th 2017 (at 7 locations) and from June 30th to September 23th 2018 (at 12 locations). A network of Pluvimate drop-counting raingauges (www.driptych.com) measured continuously the rainfall intensity at a 2-minute resolution. Operation and characteristics of the raingauges are detailed in Benoit et al. (2018) and Michelon et al. (2020), and the rating curve is described by Ceperley et al. (2018).

Description of the files:

• data_2017.csv and data_2018.csv contain the rainfall intensities for the 2017 and 2018 observation periods, respectively, along with the main river discharge measured at the outlet over the same 2-minutes time step as the rainfall intensity. We also provide areal rainfall intensity aggregated over 1) the whole catchment, 2) the lower (northern) half of the catchment, 3) the upper (southern) half of the catchment.
  Columns:
  • year [-]
  • month [-]
  • day [-]
  • hour [-]
  • minute [-]
  • discharge [m3/s]
  • specific discharge [mm/day]
  • P St. X [mm]: rainfall amount measured at the station X over 2 minutes
  • P all [mm]: rainfall amount aggregated over the whole catchment over 2 minutes
  • P lower [mm]: rainfall amount aggregated over the lower (northern) part of the catchment over 2 minutes
  • P upper [mm]: rainfall amount aggregated over the upper (southern) part of the catchment over 2 minutes
• stations.csv describes the raingauge locations.
  Columns:
  • Station ID [-]
  • lon [WGS84]: decimal longitude of the station into WGS84
  • lat [WGS84]: decimal latitude of the station into WGS84
  • E [CH1903]: east coordinate into Swiss Coordinate System
  • N [CH1903]: north coordinate into Swiss Coordinate System
  • elevation [m asl]: altitude of the station in meters above the sea level
  • data in 2017 [-]: flag if the station was working over the 2017 observation period
  • data in 2018 [-]: flag if the station was working over the 2018 observation period
• rainfall_viewer.m is a MatLab script (created with MatLab 2017b) which allows the joint visualization of the rainfall intensities and river discharge. It produces a composite figure with the following plots:
  • On top the general hydrograph over the whole observation period [mm/day]. The red dashed lines mark out period that the other plots are focus on. The shaded red areas correspond to when the river stage data was not available.
  • In the middle a zoomed magnification of the hydrograph that shows a detailed view of the discharge in the river [mm/day]. When a river response is associated, the discharge event is marked with dashed red lines. Between these vertical lines a line joining the initial and final baseflow is drawn, separating the discharge amount fed by the baseflow (under the line) to the fast runoff (over the line). The red square shows the center of mass of the fast runoff.
  • On the bottom the rainfall recorded by each of the 12 raingauges (the y-axis scale between 2 stations is about 20 mm/h) is shown. The rainfall event is marked by dashed green lines. For rainfall events causing a river reaction, an additional dotted green line marks the time taken as the beginning of the rainfall event.
  • On the left, a map with the 12 raingauge locations show the total amount of rainfall recorded by each station during the event (a red cross shows missing data).
    
    The choice of displaying 2017 or 2018 data is made at the beginning of the code by specifying the database file (“data_2017.mat” or “data_2018.mat”). It is possible to zoom in the plots by clicking with the left and right mouse buttons to define respectively the starting and ending of the visualization window. The middle button defines a third time reference used to identify rainfall intensity peaks or discharge peaks. Statistics concerning the visualization period are displayed on the MatLab console.
    Pressing [enter] will save the figure into a PNG file named with the starting and ending dates of the visualization window.