Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

River systems are an integral part of the water cycle. Observational runoff data are fundamental for the sustainable management of water resources and for the validation of hydrological models across all scales. The Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) at the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG). Established in 1988, it holds the most substantive collection of quality assured river discharge data worldwide. GRDC has been a key partner in a number of data collection and data management projects and provides the link between national hydrological and hydrometeorological services and the international research community. Currently, the Global Runoff Database contains river discharge data collected at daily or monthly intervals from more than 10,000 stations in 160 countries, dating back up to 200 years. As a trustworthy source for runoff data, GRDC has been integrated into the WMO Catalogue for Climate Data, supporting climate research and environmental risk assessment. In addition, GRDC provides different sets of geospatial data products that have formed an important basis for various modelling studies. As the awareness for open data and reproducibility has increased in recent years, GRDC is working to simplify data provision to its users. GRDC data and products are accessible online for non-commercial use (https://grdc.bafg.de/). However, there are still hurdles on the way to a completely open and free exchange of data such as restrictive data policies and a lack of data standardization.