Collation of Australian modeller's streamflow dataset for 780 unregulated Australian catchments

Author:

Zhang, Yongqiang; Viney, Neil ; Frost, Andrew; Oke, Alison; Brooks, Matthew; Chen, Yun ; Campbell, Nathan

Date of Publication:

2013-06-30

Publication Type:

Report

Pages:

115 p

Abstract:

This report summarises the collation of a daily streamflow and catchment attribute dataset for 780 unregulated and unimpaired catchments across Australia. This study was undertaken to providing a consistent national dataset for calibration and validation of the Australian Water Resources Assessment (AWRA) system model under the Water Information Research and Development Alliance (WIRADA) between CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology. This data also serves as a standard publicly available national dataset for hydrological model evaluation. A set of 780 unregulated and unimpaired stations (or catchments) were selected from more than 4000 stations across Australia using four selection criteria aimed towards identification of unregulated and umimpaired catchments with sufficient length of record for meaningful use in model calibration and validation. Instantaneous or daily streamflow data for these gauging stations were requested from state water agencies and data quality codes were used to obtain benchmark daily streamflow data and unified 6-class quality codes for each catchment. Catchment boundaries were delineated for each selected gauge station. For each catchment, gauge information and catchment attributes were extracted or calculated. These included unified station number, station name, river name, state, gauge latitude/longitude, elevation, slope, climate, soil hydraulic properties and land cover types. Finally, subsets of the 780 catchments were selected for calibration and validation of the AWRA-L model. This streamflow dataset is being used in refinement of the AWRA system model, which in turn is being used by the Bureau in production of the annual National Water Account (NWA; see http://www.bom.gov.au/water/nwa/) and annual Australian Water Resource Assessment Reports (http://www.bom.gov.au/water/awra/).

Publisher:

CSIRO

Place of Publication:

Australia

Keywords:

streamflow; data; collation; Australia

Field Of Research:

Surfacewater Hydrology

Full Text Availability:

Published Version (pdf) (6.43MB)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4225/08/58b5baad4fcc2

Rights Notice:

This report has been placed on the CSIRO repository and may be made available to persons outside of CSIRO for non commercial purposes, in its entirety and without deletion of disclaimers and copyright information.

Series Title & No:

Water for a Healthy Country Flagship Report series

Identifier:

EP113194

Publication Sub Type:

Technical Report (Author)

Language:

English

ISSN/ISBN:

1835095X

Attribution Statement:

Zhang, Yongqiang; Viney, Neil; Frost, Andrew; Oke, Alison; Brooks, Matthew; Chen, Yun; Campbell, Nathan. Collation of Australian modeller's streamflow dataset for 780 unregulated Australian catchments. Australia: CSIRO; 2013. https://doi.org/10.4225/08/58b5baad4fcc2