Data Availability

The WATCH project has produced a large number of data sets which should be of considerable use in regional and global studies of climate and water. Some of these datasets are described in the special collection, particularly Weedon et al. 2011 and Haddeland et al 2011. This data are currently hosted by IIASA in Austria on a basic FTP site available to project partners only. 

In the month of October 2011, the datasets became publically available. These include the meteorological data used by global hydrological or land surface models and model outputs. All the WATCH data is in NetCDF format (Network Common Data Format see http://www.eu-watch.org/watermip/data-format). NetCDF is an extremely efficient data format for large volumes of data and is becoming popular with modellers as both an input and output format. Data conforms to the ALMA data exchange convention; for more information, please see http://www.lmd.jussieu.fr/~polcher/ALMA/. We have introducing a web based system to catalogue and interrogate these data directly; the availability of this will be announced here on these webpages. The data can be accessed via the CEH Gateway catalogue (https://gateway.ceh.ac.uk/) use the search term WATCH in the gateway site.

The data has been developed and/or produced for the purposes of the WATCH project and no warranty is given as to its suitability for use by the user. No liability is accepted by the WATCH project and its members for any errors or omissions in the data or associated information and/or documentation. Use of the data should include acknowledgement of the WATCH project, authors of the data and previously published texts. These references are included in CEH Gateway catalogue records. Users of the data should consult the citations and instructions as indicated in the “README files” stored with the Data on the IIASA ftp site.

Outline of what is available

  1. WATCH Forcing Data 20th Century: a meteorological forcing dataset for land surface and hydrological models.  Five variables are at 6 hourly resolution and five variables are at 3 hourly resolution
  2. WATCH Driving Data 21st Century: similar to the WATCH forcing data but for the 21st Century and is constructed from model output not interpolated observational data. Two climate scenarios, B1, A2 and a Control were each run through three global climate models (CNRM, ECHAM5 and IPSL) to produce a total of 9 sets of future driving data at 0.5 degree resolution. Output data is at daily resolution
  3. WATCH 20th Century Model Output Datasets: the WATCH forcing data has been run through nine land surface or global hydrological models, to produce a range of output variables
  4. WATCH 21st Century Model Output: the 21st century WATCH driving data was put through ten land surface and global hydrological models
  5. 20th Century Ensemble Data: ensemble of model output data from 5 models for 4 hydrological variables, stored as daily data in monthly netCDF files
  6. Test Basin data: 21st C driving data for each test basin (Crete, Glomma, Nitra, Upper-Elbe, Upper Guadiana)