Global River Widths from Landsat (GRWL): River Centerlines and Water Masks

A global database of river and stream extents derived from Landsat satellite imagery. The repository contains three primary files: a simplified vector product of river centerlines with width statistics, a raster water mask product with 830 tiles, and a detailed vector product. It was created by George H. Allen and Tamlin M. Pavelsky and published in a 2018 Science article.

Use Cases

• Modeling global hydrological processes based on river width and length statistics.
• Analyzing surface water extent and connectivity using the classified water mask tiles.
• Studying river morphology and variability using segment-level width metrics (min, median, mean, max).
• Differentiating between river, lake, tidal, and canal water bodies based on the lakeflag attribute.

Strengths

• Provides a global extent of rivers and streams, as described in the associated Science publication.
• Includes multiple data products (vector, raster, simplified) for different user needs.
• The simplified vector product calculates summary statistics (width_min, width_med, width_mean, width_max, width_sd) for each river segment.
• The raster mask product consists of 830 GeoTIFF tiles at 30-meter resolution.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation for the full vector product is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The raster mask is described as an intermediate product and is not explicitly validated.

Provenance

Source

University of North Carolina Health Care (author affiliation).

Collection Method

Derived from Landsat satellite imagery, as described in Allen and Pavelsky (2018).

Time Range

Imagery time range is not specified in the provided description.

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Global.