This is the readme file for the ET-WB dataset described in the ESSD paper "ET-WB: water balance-based estimations of terrestrial evaporation over global land and major global basins" from Xiong et al. (2023)
ET-WB dataset-The monthly water balance data from May 2002-December 2021 for the 168 river basins and global land from 23 precipitaiton, 29 runoff, and 7 terrestrial water storage changes datasets.
The five-dimensions (236*169*23*7*29) of the matrix represent the time, regions, precipitation, terrestrial water storage changes, and runoff datasets used respectively.
ET-WB is distributed as three kind of formats: Mat (ET-WB.mat), NetCDF (ET_WB.nc), and Shapefile (ET_WB.shp) (only for the ensemble median value). All the formats share the same definitions of dimensions (as below), except for the ArcGIS shapefile that is provided for individual regions (168 river basins and global land excluding Antarctic and Greenland).
File shapefile.rar is the geospatial database of the study area that can be open in ArcGIS software. 
Dimension1
1-236:Months from May 2002 to December 2021.
Dimension2
1-168:168 river basins with the corresponding basin ID shown in the Table S1 of the manuscript.
169:the global land defined in the manuscript.
Dimension3
1:ERA5-land
2:ERA5
3:NOAA CIRES 20th Century-v3
4:JRA55
5:MERRA2
6:NCEP NCAR-Reanalysis 1
7:NCEP DOE-Reanalysis 2
8:CFSR-v1&2
9:GPM IMERG-v06
10:GPCP-v3.2
11:MSWEP-v2.8
12:PERSIANN CDR-v1
13:TRMM 3B43-v7
14:GSMaP
15:CHIRPS-v2.0
16:PGF-v3
17:CRU TS-v4.06
18:GPCC-v2020
19:CPC Unified
20:GLDAS-v1
21:GLDAS-v2.0
22:GLDAS-v2.1
23:WFDEI
Dimension4
1:GRACE CSR RL06 mascons-v02
2:GRACE JPL RL06 mascons-v02
3:GRACE GSFC RL06 mascons-v02
4:GRACE CSR RL06 Level-2 SH
5:GRACE JPL RL06 Level-2 SH
6:GRACE GFZ RL06 Level-2 SH
7:WGHM
Dimension5
1:GRUN_v1_AgERA5_WGS84_05
2:GRUN_v1_CRUTS4.1_WGS84_05
3:GRUN_v1_CRUTS4.3_WGS84_05
4:GRUN_v1_CRUTS4.4_WGS84_05
5:GRUN_v1_ERA5_LAND_WGS84_05
6:GRUN_v1_ERA5_WGS84_05
7:GRUN_v1_ERAI_LAND_WGS84_05
8:GRUN_v1_ERAI_WGS84_05
9:GRUN_v1_EWEMBI_WGS84_05
10:GRUN_v1_GSWP3_EWEMBI_WGS84_05
11:GRUN_v1_GSWP3_W5E5_WGS84_05
12:GRUN_v1_GSWP3_WGS84_05
13:GRUN_v1_MERRA2_WGS84_05
14:GRUN_v1_MERRA2_corr_WGS84_05
15:GRUN_v1_MSWEP_v2.2_ERA5_LAND_WGS84_05
16:GRUN_v1_MSWEP_v2.2_ERA5_WGS84_05
17:GRUN_v1_PGFv2_WGS84_05
18:GRUN_v1_PGFv3_WGS84_05
19:GRUN_v1_WFDE5_CRU_WGS84_05
20:GRUN_v1_WFDE5_GPCC_WGS84_05
21:GRUN_v1_WFDEI_CRU_WGS84_05
22:GRUN_v1_WFDEI_GPCC_WGS84_05
23:GRUN_v1_WFD_WGS84_05
24:LORA-v1.0
25:WGHM
26:Global River Flow and Continental Discharge Dataset
27:GloFAS-v2.1
28:GloFAS-v3.0
29:GloFAS-v3.1

Please find the details of the datasets and basins in the article (Xiong et al., 2023).
Xiong, J. et al. ET-WB: water balance-based estimations of terrestrial evaporation over global land and major global basins. Earth Syst. Sci. Data preprint, (2023).