Current and future risk of unprecedented GB droughts

This dataset contains GR6J modelled daily river flow time series for 95 river catchments in Great Britain driven by precipitation and temperature (used to calculate potential evapotranspiration) data from the EC-Earth Single Model Initial Condition Large Ensemble (SMILE) climate model. The large ensemble is based on the EC-Earth Global Climate Model (GCM) v2.3 and is run for present day (equivalent to present day climate with observed global mean surface temperature for the period 2011-2015) and pre-industrial plus 2°C and 3°C global warming conditions. For each ensemble member, 25 new realizations are created through variations to the initial conditions through stochastic parameterizations and run for 5 years. In total, they make up 2000 years of data for each global warming level (i.e. 16 ensemble members x 25 realizations x 5 years = 2000 years). All ensemble members are pooled to form a continuous 2000-year time series of meteorological input and daily modelled river flows. Simulated river flows is obtained from using the best performing model run for each river catchment to drive GR6J hydrological models for each catchment.

Each file presented is in the following format:

Naming convention “LE_Flow_.csv

where refers to the identification number for each catchment defined by the National River Flow Archive (NRFA).

Each file contain 730400 rows of continuous 2000-years of daily simulated river flows for each catchment over five columns:

Qsim – simulated river flow (in m3/s) of the top ranked parameter set driven by the large ensemble data

Catch_id – NRFA catchment id

Ens_member – ensemble member of the EC-Earth large ensemble

Realisation – realization number of the EC-Earth large ensemble

Three files are provided for each catchment for present-day (PD), 2°C and 3°C conditions.