The Hydrometeorological Sandbox - École de technologie supérieure (HYSETS) is a rich, general and large-scale database for hydrological modelling covering 14425 watersheds in North America. The database includes data covering the period 1950-2023 depending on the type and source of data:

• Watershed properties including boundaries, area, elevation slope, land use, soil properties and other physiographic information;
• Hydrometric gauging station discharge time-series;
• Maximum and minimum daily air temperatures and precipitation from weather gauges, NRCan and Livneh gridded interpolated products, SCDNA infilled-station data and ERA5 / ERA5-Land reanalyses;
• ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalysis also contain dewpoint temperature, 10m U- and V- components of wind, evaporation, runoff, snow water equivalent, snow evaporation, snowfall, snowmelt, surface net solar radiation, surface net thermal radiation, surface pressure, surface runoff, surface solar radiation downwards, surface thermal radiation downwards and total cloud cover (only in ERA5 as itdoes not exist in ERA5-Land)
• SNODAS and ERA5-Land snow water equivalent;
• Other diagnostic variables;
• Monthly aggregation of meteorological variables;
• Elevation band data for each catchment in 100m increments.

All data has been processed and averaged at the watershed scale, and provides a solid basis for hydrological modelling, climate change impact studies, model calibration assessment, regionalization method evaluation and essentially any study requiring access to large amounts of spatiotemporally varied hydrometeorological data.

Paper citation: Arsenault, R., Brissette, F., Martel, J. L., Troin, M., Lévesque, G., Davidson-Chaput, J., ... & Poulin, A. (2020). A comprehensive, multisource database for hydrometeorological modeling of 14,425 North American watersheds. Scientific Data, 7(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00583-2

This is the accompanying dataset to the following paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-01975-w

Caravan is an open community dataset of meteorological forcing data, catchment attributes, and discharge daat for catchments around the world. Additionally, Caravan provides code to derive meteorological forcing data and catchment attributes from the same data sources in the cloud, making it easy for anyone to extend Caravan to new catchments. The vision of Caravan is to provide the foundation for a truly global open source community resource that will grow over time.

If you use Caravan in your research, it would be appreciated to not only cite Caravan itself, but also the source datasets, to pay respect to the amount of work that was put into the creation of these datasets and that made Caravan possible in the first place.

All current development and additional community extensions can be found at https://github.com/kratzert/Caravan

IMPORTANT: Due to size limitations for individual repositories, the netCDF version and the CSV version of Caravan (since Version 1.6) are split into two different repositories. You can find the netCDF version at https://zenodo.org/records/14673536

Channel Log:

• 23 May 2022: Version 0.2 - Resolved a bug when renaming the LamaH gauge ids from the LamaH ids to the official gauge ids provided as "govnr" in the LamaH dataset attribute files.
• 24 May 2022: Version 0.3 - Fixed gaps in forcing data in some "camels" (US) basins.
• 15 June 2022: Version 0.4 - Fixed replacing negative CAMELS US values with NaN (-999 in CAMELS indicates missing observation).
• 1 December 2022: Version 0.4 - Added 4298 basins in the US, Canada and Mexico (part of HYSETS), now totalling to 6830 basins. Fixed a bug in the computation of catchment attributes that are defined as pour point properties, where sometimes the wrong HydroATLAS polygon was picked. Restructured the attribute files and added some more meta data (station name and country).
• 16 January 2023: Version 1.0 - Version of the official paper release. No changes in the data but added a static copy of the accompanying code of the paper. For the most up to date version, please check https://github.com/kratzert/Caravan
• 10 May 2023: Version 1.1 - No data change, just update data description.
• 17 May 2023: Version 1.2 - Updated a handful of attribute values that were affected by a bug in their derivation. See https://github.com/kratzert/Caravan/issues/22 for details.
• 16 April 2024: Version 1.4 - Added 9130 gauges from the original source dataset that were initially not included because of the area thresholds (i.e. basins smaller than 100sqkm or larger than 2000sqkm). Also extended the forcing period for all gauges (including the original ones) to 1950-2023. Added two different download options that include timeseries data only as either csv files (Caravan-csv.tar.xz) or netcdf files (Caravan-nc.tar.xz). Including the large basins also required an update in the earth engine code
• 16 Jan 2025: Version 1.5 - Added FAO Penman-Monteith PET (potential_evaporation_sum_FAO_PENMAN_MONTEITH) and renamed the ERA5-LAND potential_evaporation band to potential_evaporation_sum_ERA5_LAND. Also added all PET-related climated indices derived with the Penman-Monteith PET band (suffix "_FAO_PM") and renamed the old PET-related indices accordingly (suffix "_ERA5_LAND").
• 27 May 2025: Version 1.6
  
  • Updated the CAMELS-AUS data to source from CAMELS-AUS v2. This means more basins (561 compared to 222) and more recent streamflow data (2022 compared to 2014). Note that the gauge id for four basins changed between the original CAMELS-AUS version and v2. Those gauges are ['camelsaus_224213A', 'camelsaus_224214A', 'camelsaus_227225A', 'camelsaus_403213A'] that all lost their trailing "A". To stay synced with CAMELS-AUS (v2), we also adapted the new naming.
  • Added VERSION file to the root directory that contains the current version number.
  • Updated the code to the most recent GitHub snapshot (commit 6eab036).
  • Due to the 50GB repository limit, we had to split the netCDF version and the CSV version into two separate repositories. The CSV version can be found under https://zenodo.org/records/15530021

THIS IS A PRE-RELEASE, WHILE THE CARAVAN IS UNDER REVISION.

Check out the preprint at: https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/3345/ (accepted for publication at Nature Scientific Data).

Caravan is an open community dataset of meteorological forcing data, catchment attributes, and discharge daat for catchments around the world. Additionally, Caravan provides code to derive meteorological forcing data and catchment attributes from the same data sources in the cloud, making it easy for anyone to extend Caravan to new catchments. The vision of Caravan is to provide the foundation for a truly global open source community resource that will grow over time.

Channel Log:

• 23 May 2022: Version 0.2 - Resolved a bug when renaming the LamaH gauge ids from the LamaH ids to the official gauge ids provided as "govnr" in the LamaH dataset attribute files.
• 24 May 2022: Version 0.3 - Fixed gaps in forcing data in some "camels" (US) basins.
• 15 June 2022: Version 0.4 - Fixed replacing negative CAMELS US values with NaN (-999 in CAMELS indicates missing observation).
• 1 December 2022: Version 0.4 - Added 4298 basins in the US, Canada and Mexico (part of HYSETS), now totalling to 6830 basins. Fixed a bug in the computation of catchment attributes that are defined as pour point properties, where sometimes the wrong HydroATLAS polygon was picked. Restructured the attribute files and added some more meta data (station name and country).
• 16 January 2023: Version 1.0 - Version of the official paper release. No changes in the data but added a static copy of the accompanying code of the paper. For the most up to date version, please check https://github.com/kratzert/Caravan

Essentailly a rehosted version of an exisiting database of standardised forcing data.

Caravan is a colection of Camels data sets (and others) from around the world collecting hydrological forcing and observation in a standardised way.

This dataset has been prepared to work nicely with eWaterCycle by Bart Schilperoort using this script which compresses and structures the original dataset NetCDF combining the files into one.

The Caravan data set has forcing from Era5-land, which differs from the original Camels dataset which used daymet, nldas and maurer.

For this reason the Camels-USA file was updated to now also include the original forcing alongside the Era5-land forcing caravan supplies.

Contains a total of 6830 basins from:

• Camels United States of America (482)
• Camels Australia (150)
• Camels Brazil (376)
• Camels Chile (314)
• Camels Great Britain (408)
• part of HYSETS (4621)
• LamaH-CE (479)