European River Basin Hydrology from ORCHIDEE Model Runs with Synthetic Precipitation

Julie Collignan and colleagues at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique produced this dataset for a study on climate change effects on watershed evaporation and discharge. It contains modeled outputs for 2,196 river basins across Europe, based on runs of the ORCHIDEE land surface model forced with GSWP3 and synthetic precipitation data from 1901 to 2010. The dataset includes precipitation, evapotranspiration, potential evapotranspiration, and discharge for each basin under different synthetic forcing scenarios.

Use Cases

• Analyzing the sensitivity of river discharge to changes in annual average precipitation based on the 'cstmean' synthetic forcing.
• Studying the impact of intra-annual precipitation distribution on evapotranspiration using the 'f2000' forcing scenario.
• Fitting parametric equations of the Budyko framework to decompose trends in discharge based on precipitation, evapotranspiration, and potential evapotranspiration outputs.
• Comparing modeled discharge (DisMod) against observed discharge (DisObs) data sourced from GRDC and European hydrological services.

Strengths

• Covers 2,196 river basins across Europe, providing broad spatial coverage.
• Includes outputs from four distinct model runs, including a reference run and synthetic forcings.
• Integrates observed discharge data from authoritative sources like the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), using the ORCHIDEE land surface model.

Collection Method

Model outputs from the ORCHIDEE LSM forced with GSWP3 and synthetically modified precipitation datasets.

Time Range

1901 to 2010

Geography

Europe