River temperature response to atmospheric heatwaves in the European Alps

This dataset contains data related to the research paper "River temperature response to atmospheric heatwaves is modulated by discharge and meltwater" by Van Hamel, Janzing, and Brunner (2026), published in "Communications Earth & Environment" (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-03269-6).

This dataset contains data from 275 river gauging stations in Switzerland and Austria. The shapefiles with catchment delineations and station locations are provided, including an overview of some catchment characteristics. Furthermore, we provide the annual regime data for all catchments for the considered 11 hydro-climatic variables: air temperature, water temperature, discharge, surface net solar radiation, relative humidity, precipitation, actual evaporation, precipitation minus actual evaporation, liquid volumetric soil moisture, meltwater, and the meltfraction. All regimes are constructed based on 10 years of data (2011-2021) and are defined as the 50th percentile of the mean daily values, smoothed over a 30-days time window. Finally, we provide detailed information on the identified and extracted atmospheric heatwaves per catchment, the overlap with riverine heatwaves, and the absolute values, the anomalies, and the z-score of the 11 different variables during the time window of each atmospheric heatwave.

For an extended explanation of the data sources, methodology, and data analyses, we refer to our research paper.