the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
CAMELS-FR dataset: A large-sample hydroclimatic dataset for France to explore hydrological diversity and support model benchmarking
Abstract. Over the last decade, large-sample approaches, i.e. based on large catchment sets, have become increasingly popular in hydrological studies. Efforts were made to assemble and disseminate national catchment datasets. This article aims to add a stone to the construction of a large international database of catchments by proposing the CAMELS-FR dataset, a contribution to the CAMELS initiative (Catchment attributes and meteorology for large-sample studies). The first version presented here gathers hydroclimatic data and physical attributes for a set of 654 catchments in France. These catchments cover a wide spectrum of hydroclimatic conditions (from oceanic to continental, mountainous or Mediterranean conditions), and are considered to have limited human influence. Data include time series of daily streamflow (with at least 30 years over the 1970–2021 period; also aggregated to monthly and yearly time steps) and of eleven catchment-scale daily climate variables (including precipitation, potential evaporation, and air temperature), as well as a total of 255 catchments attributes organised in ten classes (e.g. geology, soil, land cover, etc.). River flow time series were quality-checked. Along with the database itself, two graphical tools are proposed, namely dynamic graphs to visualize time series and graphical fact sheets to summarize the main catchments characteristics. Care was taken to provide as many metadata as possible to help users interpret their results based on this dataset. We intend to update the database regularly to include new available data and account for end-users' feedbacks.
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Status: open (until 20 Dec 2024)
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RC1: 'Comment on essd-2024-415', Markus Hrachowitz, 20 Nov 2024
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I would like to commend the authors for their effort to collate this impressively detailed data set. Extending existing open data sets, it is an important further step towards truly large-sample hydrology. As such it will be very useful to many in the community.
The data included in the data set are carefully selected, described with quite some detail and accompanied by abundant and very useful additional information, including soil properties and geology. In an additional effort, the authors also went some lengths to ensure sufficient quality of the data set, with in detail descriptions of the systematic quality checks they did.
I find, in particular, the visualization tool that allows users to quickly extract ample information from the Hydroportail a very useful and welcome addition.
I have only two very minor comments/questions:
(1) It would be helpful for the reader to add a very brief description of how CAMELS-FR complements the recently published EStreams data set (Do Nascimento et al., 2024)
(2) not sure what the different symbol sizes in Figure 5 indicate. Catchment area? Please add this information in the Figure caption
Congratulations and many thanks for this contribution!
Best wishes,
Markus Hrachowitz
Reference:
do Nascimento, T. V., Rudlang, J., Höge, M., van der Ent, R., Chappon, M., Seibert, J., ... & Fenicia, F. (2024). EStreams: An integrated dataset and catalogue of streamflow, hydro-climatic and landscape variables for Europe. Scientific Data, 11(1), 879.Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-415-RC1 -
CC1: 'Comment on essd-2024-415', Joseph Janssen, 24 Nov 2024
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In section 4, can you specify how many catchments failed each of your four catchment selection criteria (i.e., area mismatch). Thanks!
-Joseph Janssen
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-415-CC1 -
RC2: 'Comment on essd-2024-415', Larisa Tarasova, 01 Dec 2024
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The submitted manuscript provides a description of catchment attributes and hydrometeorological time series for 654 French catchments. All the data described very clearly, manuscript is well-organized and well-written. The visualization tool is amazing! CAMELS-FR will be a very valuable addition for the community of large sample hydrology. I have just a few editorial suggestions.
Kind regards,
Larisa Tarasova
Editorial comments
Line 45-48: It would be helpful to specify here a possible nature of these outliers (apart from karstic catchments).
Figure 2: This is not critical, but would look nicer if all maps would have the same style in terms of displaying administrative boundaries and areas outside France. Consider homogenizing the panels of this Figure.
Line 162: in some stations
Line 169: lack of artificial reservoirs
Line 170: sufficient streamflow quality
Table 1: explain what SIM2 stands for
Table 2: Which attribute is meant here by “Other”. I did not find a corresponding explanation in Section 6. Please clarify.
Figure 7: Very nice!
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2024-415-RC2
Data sets
CAMELS-FR dataset Olivier Delaigue et al. https://doi.org/10.57745/WH7FJR
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