An Extended Data Set of River Discharges for Validation of General Circulation Models

This data set is a compilation of annual mean river discharge values
for 981 rivers from all regions of the world. It is meant to describe
freshwater discharges to the oceans. All files are ASCII files and
have not been compressed in any way. The procedure used to develop
this data set is as follows: Discharge values for as many rivers as
possible were gathered from as many sources as possible. Often, this
meant there were several values for a particular river.For each river,
obvious errors and duplicated values were removed. It was assumed that
if two or more sources quote the same value,then they are probably
referencing the same original source. For each river, the mean and
standard deviation of the remaining values were calculated. Then
values that were more than two standard deviationsfrom the mean were
eliminated as outlying values. The mean and standard deviation were
then calculated a second time and those are the values used in this
data set.