MERIT-FlowTopo: A reusable computational foundation for hyperresolution hydrology on the global 90 m drainage network

A reusable computational foundation for hyperresolution hydrology: precomputed topological traversal structures for the global 90 m MERIT Hydro drainage network (22.2 billion land pixels). A flow network is static, so the structures that govern how efficiently a model computes over it are built once from the D8 flow directions and reused — the order pixels are visited, the layers updated in parallel, and the partition that balances load across processors. Any routing or terrain-analysis kernel reads these rasters instead of rebuilding them. Derived from MERIT Hydro (Yamazaki et al., 2019; doi:10.1029/2019WR024873), not redistributed here. Files in this record FileDescriptionregion_000XX.zip (×65)per-region structures (the four recommended)region_00043_extended.zipregion 43’s four alternative structuresMANIFEST.txtlist of every data ZIP with sizeFlowTopo-Scripts.zipthree-script Python reference implementationPaper-Figures.zipinput data and plotting scripts for every figureMERIT-FlowTopo_README.mdfull documentation The structures Per-region GeoTIFF (ZSTD-19), for 65 hydrologically independent regions: Recommended (all 65 regions): depth-first search from the pit serial sequence (seq_dfs), conflict-free downstream layering (lyr_cfds), as-late-as-possible layering (lyr_alap), subbasin-level partition (part_subbasin). Alternatives (region 43 only): seq_topo, seq_bfs, lyr_asap, part_basin — with the base ZIP, region 43 carries the full set of eight for comparison. Grid: 1/1200° (≈ 90 m), WGS84. ≈ 978 GB uncompressed, ≈ 49 GB compressed. Related records MERIT-DrainAttr — doi:10.5281/zenodo.20686665 Region partition — doi:10.5281/zenodo.20344113 MERIT Hydro (input) — doi:10.1029/2019WR024873