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Caravan MultiMet: Extending Caravan with Multiple Weather Nowcasts and Forecasts

Guy Shalev, Frederik Kratzert

Abstract

The Caravan large-sample hydrology dataset (Kratzert et al., 2023) was created to standardize and harmonize streamflow data from various regional datasets, combined with globally available meteorological forcing and catchment attributes. This community-driven project also allows researchers to conveniently extend the dataset for additional basins, as done 6 times to date (see https://github.com/kratzert/Caravan/discussions/10). We present a novel extension to Caravan, focusing on enriching the meteorological forcing data. Our extension adds three precipitation nowcast products (CPC, IMERG v07 Early, and CHIRPS) and three weather forecast products (ECMWF IFS HRES, GraphCast, and CHIRPS-GEFS) to the existing ERA5-Land reanalysis data. The inclusion of diverse data sources, particularly weather forecasts, enables more robust evaluation and benchmarking of hydrological models, especially for real-time forecasting scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this extension makes Caravan the first large-sample hydrology dataset to incorporate weather forecast data, significantly enhancing its capabilities and fostering advancements in hydrological research, benchmarking, and real-time hydrologic forecasting. The data is publicly available under a CC-BY-4.0 license on Zenodo in two parts (https://zenodo.org/records/14161235, https://zenodo.org/records/14161281) and on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - see more under the Data Availability chapter.

Caravan MultiMet: Extending Caravan with Multiple Weather Nowcasts and Forecasts

Abstract

The Caravan large-sample hydrology dataset (Kratzert et al., 2023) was created to standardize and harmonize streamflow data from various regional datasets, combined with globally available meteorological forcing and catchment attributes. This community-driven project also allows researchers to conveniently extend the dataset for additional basins, as done 6 times to date (see https://github.com/kratzert/Caravan/discussions/10). We present a novel extension to Caravan, focusing on enriching the meteorological forcing data. Our extension adds three precipitation nowcast products (CPC, IMERG v07 Early, and CHIRPS) and three weather forecast products (ECMWF IFS HRES, GraphCast, and CHIRPS-GEFS) to the existing ERA5-Land reanalysis data. The inclusion of diverse data sources, particularly weather forecasts, enables more robust evaluation and benchmarking of hydrological models, especially for real-time forecasting scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this extension makes Caravan the first large-sample hydrology dataset to incorporate weather forecast data, significantly enhancing its capabilities and fostering advancements in hydrological research, benchmarking, and real-time hydrologic forecasting. The data is publicly available under a CC-BY-4.0 license on Zenodo in two parts (https://zenodo.org/records/14161235, https://zenodo.org/records/14161281) and on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - see more under the Data Availability chapter.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 18 sections, 4 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Data
  3. Structure of the dataset
  4. Missing Data
  5. Spatial Coverage
  6. Nowcast Products
  7. CPC
  8. IMERG
  9. CHIRPS
  10. ERA5-Land recomputed at UTC daily aggregation
  11. Forecast Products
  12. CHIRPS-GEFS
  13. ECMWF IFS HRES
  14. GraphCast
  15. Data Verification
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: The locations of Caravan gauges covered by the Caravan MultiMet extension.
  • Figure 2: The number of basins with missing CPC data by date.
  • Figure 3: The number of basins with missing CHIRPS-GEFS data by date. Notably, a large part of 2020 is missing for all basins, and February 29th on leap years.
  • Figure 4: The ERA5-Land total precipitation for a year at the gauge "camelsgb_54007", which shows strong agreement between the two versions of the data -- blue for the original Caravan dataset, orange for the MultiMet extension. It seems they have occasional disagreements on peak values.