Suspended sediment concentration in Alpine rivers - annual regimes and extreme events

This dataset contains the data related to the research paper 'Suspended sediment concentrations in Alpine rivers: from annual regimes to sub-daily extreme events' by Van Hamel et al. (2025), which is published in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3985. It contains the data from 38 gauging stations in Switzerland and Austria. The shapefiles with catchment delinieations and station locations are provided, including an overview of the static catchment characteristics. As the study adresses two main analyses, namely an analysis on the annual regimes and an analysis of extreme SSC events, this dataset also contains two folders.

The folder 'Analysis_annual_regimes' provides the annual median SSC regimes for each catchment and the result of the clustering based on MST-indicators. The annual regimes of snowmelt, glacial melt, precipitation and discharge are also provided. All regimes are constructed based on 10-12 years of data (2009-2023) and are defined as the 50th percentile of the mean daily values, smoothed over a 30-days time window.

The folder 'Analysis_extreme_events' gives the extracted extreme SSC events per station. Extreme SSC events are defined as events for which the peak value exceeds the locally defined 99th percentile threshold in the hourly time series. For each extracted extreme event, the event characteristics are provided, such as the start-/end-date of the event, the duration, peak SSC value, rainfall/snowmelt/glacial melt in the 24 hours prior to the peak SSC, and antecedent conditions like the snowcover and soil moisture prior to the event.

For an extended explanation of the data sources, methodology and data analyses, we refer to our research paper.