PatagoniaMet: A multi-source hydrometeorological dataset for Western Patagonia

PatagoniaMet v1.0 (PMET from here on) is a new dataset for Western Patagonia that consists of two datasets: i) PMET-obs, a compilation of quality-controlled ground-based hydrometeorological data, and ii) PMET-sim, a daily gridded product of precipitation, and maximum and minimum temperature. PMET-obs was developed using a 4-step quality control process applied to 523 hydro-meteorological time series (precipitation, air temperature, potential evaporation, streamflow and lake level stations) obtained from eight institutions in Chile and Argentina. Based on this dataset and currently available uncorrected gridded products (in this case ERA5), PMET-sim was developed using statistical bias correction procedures (i.e. quantile mapping), spatial regression models (random forest) and hydrological methods (Budyko framework). Details are given below. - PMET-obs is a compilation of five hydrometeorological variables obtained from eight institutions in Chile and Argentina. The daily quality controlled data of each variable are stored in separate .csv files with the following naming convention: variable_PMETobs_timeperiod_version/timestep.csv. Each column represents a different gauge with its "gauge_id". Each variable has an additional .csv file containing the metadata for each station (variable_PMETobs_version_metadata.csv). In order to make transparent the possible erroneous data that were discarded from the quality-controlled version, a .zip file with the raw data of all variables is attached. The metadata file (final and raw versions) contains the station name (gauge_name), the institution, the station location (gauge_lat and gauge_lon), the NASADEM elevation (gauge_alt) and the total number of daily records (length). In addition, the precipitation and temperature metadata include the number of monthly outliers (step Nº3 in the methods) and the number of changepoints (step Nº4 in the methods). The streamflow metadata file (Q_PMETobs_version_metadata.csv) contains more than just the location data. Following current guidelines for hydrological datasets, the upstream area corresponding to each stream gauge was delimited (.shp file in Basins_PMETobs_version.zip), and several climatic and geographic attributes were derived. The details of the attributes can be found in the README file. For the basins that were part of the hydrological modelling (and that achieved a Kling-Gupta efficiency greater than 0.5), the file Q_PMETobs_version_water_balance.csv is attached, which contains the water balance for each basin estimated for the period 1985-2019. - PMET-sim is a daily gridded product with a spatial resolution of 0.05° covering the period 1980-2020. The data for each variable (precipitation and maximum and minimum temperature) are stored in separate netcdf files with the following naming convention: variable_PMETsim_1980_2020_v10d.nc. Citation: Aguayo, R., León-Muñoz, J., Aguayo, M., Baez-Villanueva, O., Fernandez, A. Zambrano-Bigiarini, M., and Jacques-Coper, M. (2023) PatagoniaMet: A multi-source hydrometeorological dataset for Western Patagonia. Sci Data 11, 6 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02828-2 Code repository: https://github.com/rodaguayo/PatagoniaMet