Morphometry of drainage basins: a global snapshot from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission

version 0.91--31 May 2011

This data set is here to support review of a paper  (Guth, 2011).  This data set uses the SRTM data set, so it is limited to the region covered by the SRTM, and inherits the scale of the SRTM data.  The three big limitations of this data set are:

• The lack of full coverage of the northern rivers.
• The holes in the SRTM data set.
• The 15" (arc second) scale of the SRTM version used to create the drainage networks and basins, and 6" scale of the DEM used for the basin statistics.

This data set has been created from the 15" Hydrosheds, drainage basins, and stream networks (Lehner and others, 2008a, b).  The drainage network, and the 2D coordinates in it, are all derived from the Hydrosheds data, and we have not changed those.  We independently created the topology of the drainage networks from the

The following zipped files are available.  The additions/changes from Hydrosheds are noted:

• Thalwegs (25 MB): a single 3D shapefile with the thalwegs of all drainage basins with an area larger than 100 km².  This file was creating by extracting the thalwegs of the rivers from the Hydrosheds files, and adding the elevation of each node.  It also has the Strahler order of the thalweg.  The elevations in this file are noisy, and we suggest filtering them before plotting.
• Basins (33MB): a single shapefile combining the Hydrosheds basins with an area larger than 100 km².  The DBF file contains 40 geomorphic parameters computed for each basin, using a 6 arc second thinned SRTM data set, and the bounding box for each basin.  This file was created by filtering the Hydrosheds basin files by size, and merging the 7 files.
• Rivers (244 MB): 7 shapefiles.  For segments in a basin larger than 100 km², the name of the basin and the Strahler order of the stream has been added to the DBF file.  The bounding box for each basin has also been added to the DBF files.
• Basin names (1 kb): a DBF file with the names of some of the larger basins.  This was created manually.

All files use an index field BASIN_ID, which consists of a two letter continent code, a dash, and the basin number assigned by Hydrosheds (e.g. AF-24001 for the Nile).   All coordinates are unprojected latitude/longitudes with the WGS-84 datum.

References:

• Guth, P.L., 2011 (in review), Morphometry of drainage basins: a global snapshot from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission:  HESS [Hydrology and Earth System Sciences], 19 p.

• Lehner, B., Verdin, K., and Jarvis, J. New global hydrography derived from spaceborne elevation data, EOS, 89, 93-94, 2008a.

• Lehner, B., Verdin, K., and Jarvis, J. HydroSHEDS Technical Documentation Version 1.1: http://gisdata.usgs.gov/webappcontent/HydroSHEDS/downloads/HydroSHEDS_TechDoc_v11.pdf, 2008b.