A 500-year runoff reconstruction for European catchments

Runoff is an important hydrological variable for
determining past hydrological pattern and extremities but the hydrological
variables are available for short time period. This paper
reconstructs runoff series from European catchment since 1500 AD. The study
used basin average precipitation and temperature that were estimated from
the reconstructed forcing by averaging the grid cells covering the specific
catchment boundary. Similarly, we calculated the average catchment PDSI from
the OWDA.
** (1) Content **
At each folder, files are saved with the station river names, which correspond to the station identifiers (GRDCno) are listed below.
GRDCno station_river
6123100 Montjean_Loire
6123300 Blois_Loire
6335020 Rees_Rhine
6335060 Koeln_Rhine
6335301 Neuerhafen_Main
6335500 Weurzburg_Main
6337200 Intschede_Wesser
6337400 HannMuenden_Wesser
6337514 Bodenwerder_Wesser
6340120 Dresden_Elbe
6343100 Wasserburg_Inn
6742200 Orsova_Danube
6935051 BaselRheinhalle_Rhine
6935052 BaselSchifflaende_Rhine
** (1.1) Folder "Input_data"
Each files contains such fields
1 "GRDCno" GRDC station ID
2 "station_river" Station name corresponding to river ( e.g Blois_Loire)
3 "long" Longitude of station
4 "lat" Latitude of station
5 "time" Time period between 1500 to 2000
6 "pdsi" Average of scPDSI from Old World drought Atlas across each basin
7 "gPR" Average of Gridded seasonal precipitation (mm) at individual catchment
8 "gTAS" Average of Gridded seasonal temperature (degree C) at individual catchment
9 R Observed runoff (mm) from Global runoff dataset (GRDC). NA represent that the values are missing at some years
** (1.2) Folder "Runoff_recons"
Each .csv contain runoff reconstruction for one of 14 catchments
1 "Year" column indicate the year between 1500 and 2000.
2 "Simulated Runoff" represent the reconstructed runoff (in mm) with the best model
3 "Observed Runoff" includes the observed GRDC runoff (in mm) series
4 "GRUN Runoff" yearly runoff values (mm) over the catchments from the years 1902-2000

The .rds files with the same structure are available for R users (to be read with the readRDS function).

Runoff reconstructions are developed using the input data set (precipitation, temperature, and drought index ( scPDSI) ) as referenced below. While , comparative data were derived from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and the global runoff data (GRDC) center.
** (1.3) Folder "Shape_Catchments"

Station boundaries are available in the next folder 'Shape_Catchments'
* STRUCTURE:
Each GRDC station is associated with a catchment boundary; these files were named as GRDCnos.Each catchment is represented by four separate files with the same name (e.g. station_river) but different file extensions:
(1) '.shp': provides geometry of the catchment polygon.
(2) '.shx': provides shape index position.
(3) '.dbf': provides attribute table assoaciated to a specific catchment.
(4) '.prj': provides the metadata associated with the shapefiles coordinate and projection system