Res-CN: hydrometeorological time series and landscape attributes across 3254 Chinese reservoirs

Abstract

Abstract. Dams and reservoirs are human-made infrastructures that have attracted increasing attentions because of their societal and environmental significance. Towards better management and conservation of reservoirs, a dataset of reservoir-catchment characteristics is needed, considering that the amount water and material flowing into and out of reservoirs depends on their locations on the river network and the properties of upstream catchment. To date, no dataset exists for reservoir-catchment characteristics. The aim of this study is to develop the first database featuring reservoir-catchment characteristics for 3254 reservoirs with storage capacity totaling 682,595 km3 (73.2 % reservoir water storage capacity in China), to support the management and conservation of reservoirs in the context of catchment level. To ensure a more representative and accurate mapping of local variables of large reservoirs, reservoir catchments are delineated into full catchments (their full upstream contributing areas) and intermediate catchments (subtracting the area contributed by upstream reservoirs from full upstream of the current reservoir). Using both full catchments and intermediate catchments, characteristics of reservoir catchments were extracted, with a total of 512 attributes in six categories (i.e., reservoir catchment, topography, climate, soil and geology, land cover and use, and anthropogenic activity). Besides these static attributes, time series of 15 meteorological variables of catchments were extracted to support hydrological simulations for a better understanding of drivers of reservoir environment change. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive and extensive reservoir data set on water level (data available for 20 % of 3,254 reservoirs), water area (99 %), storage anomaly (92 %), and evaporation (98 %) from multisource satellites such as radar and laser altimeters and images from Landsat and Sentinel satellites. These products significantly enhance spatial and temporal coverage in comparison to existing similar products (e.g., 67 % increase in spatial resolution of water level and 225 % increase in storage anomaly) and contribute to our understanding of reservoir properties and functions within the Earth system by incorporated national or global hydrological modeling. In situ data of 138 reservoirs are employed in this study as a valuable reference for evaluation, thus enhancing our confidence in the data quality and enhancing our understanding of accuracy of current satellite datasets. Along with its extensive attributes, the Reservoir dataset in China (Res-CN) can support a broad range of applications such as water resources, hydrologic/hydrodynamic modeling, and energy planning. Res-CN is on Zenodo through https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7390715 (Shen et al., 2022a).

Res-CN (Reservoir dataset in China): hydrometeorological time series and landscape attributes across 3254 Chinese reservoirs

“…The Res-CN archive can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7664489 (Shen et al, 2022c). It is distributed with a CC-BY license.…”

“…Along with its extensive attributes, the Reservoir dataset in China (Res-CN) can support a broad range of applications such as water resources, hydrologic/hydrodynamic modeling, and energy planning. Res-CN is on Zenodo through https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7664489 (Shen et al, 2022c).…”