SWOT RiverHD: A Global Riverine Hydraulic Discontinuities Database Unveiled from SWOT Satellite

Corresponding peer-reviewed publication This dataset is the result files of the study reported in: Xu, Y., Lin, P*., Yang, X., Tang, G., Yuan, Z., Allen, G.H., Song, C., Gleason, C.J., Yamazaki, D., Frappart, F., Xu, J., Ma, Z., Wan, W., and Hong, Y. Uncovering Hydraulic Discontinuities in Global Rivers with SWOT (in review). When making use of any of the files in this dataset, please cite both the aforementioned article and the dataset herein. Summary This dataset provides a global inventory of riverine hydraulic discontinuities detected from Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite observations using the SWOT Observation Profiling (SWOOP) detection framework. The dataset contains geospatial locations and types of river breaks where abrupt changes in water surfae elevation (WSE) profiles indicate the presence of hydraulic barriers or geomorphic discontinuities along river channels. This dataset is derived from spatially continuous WSE measurements from SWOT River Single-Pass product (SWOT RiverSP, Version C, https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/SWOT_L2_HR_RiverSP_2.0). By constructing median longitudinal WSE profiles for individual river reaches and identifying step-like elevation drops, the SWOOP algorithm detects candidate river obstructions including both anthropogenic structures (e.g., dams, low-head dams, and concealed hydrualic structures under the bridges) and natural discontinuities (e.g., waterfalls and rapids). Machine-learning-based post-processing and manual visual verifictaion were used to remove false positives and assign categorical labels to detected features. The dataset includes thousands of detected hydraulic discontinuities across global river networks wider than approximately 30 m, corresponding to the spatial coverage of the SWOT river database (SWORD v16). For each detected feature, the dataset provides reach_id, node_id, geographic coordinates, and obstruction type classification. The code used to generate and analyze these datasets is publicly available in the associated GitHub repository (https://github.com/IRAN96/SWOT_RiverSP_Obstruction/). Data Structures The dataset is provided in two formats: 1. RiverHD.shp A shapefile containing point locations of global river hydraulic discontinuities detected using the SWOOP algorithm. Each feature corresponds to an individual detected obstruction and includes the following attributes: reach_id: Identifier of the river reach in the SWOT database node_id: Identifier of the corresponding SWOT node lon: Longitute lat: Latitude N/A: Indicator of obstruction origin, where N denotes natural and A denotes anthropogenic features type: Classification of the obstruction (e.g., dam, low-head dam, bridge, waterfall, rapid) 2. RiverHD.csv A tabular (CSV) version of the global river hydraulic discontinuity dataset. This file contains the same records and attributes as the shapefile, provided in a flat table format for ease of use in data analysis workflows. Software The code for reproducibility is available in github repository (https://github.com/IRAN96/SWOT_RiverSP_Obstruction).