Spatiotemporal Variability of River Ice Phenomena along the Vistula River (1950–2020)

Dataset on the occurrence of river ice phenomena along the Vistula River. River ice occurrence data were compiled from several sources. Data for 1949–1981 were obtained from the Hydrological Yearbooks of Surface Waters – Vistula (1949–1981), published by the Polish State Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology until 1970 and subsequently by the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management from 1971 onwards. As these yearbooks were available only in printed form, daily records of individual river ice phenomena were manually digitized and entered into a digital database. Data for 1981–2020 were obtained from the online database of the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management – National Research Institute (IMWM-NRI; https://danepubliczne.imgw.pl/data/dane_pomiarowo_obserwacyjne/, accessed: 7 July 2026). The “stations” sheet provides information on the monitoring stations, including station names, station codes, river kilometres, and geographical coordinates. The “Any ice phenomena (temporal)” sheet contains the annual number of days with any river ice phenomenon recorded at selected stations during 1950–2020. A day with any ice phenomenon is defined as a day on which at least one of the following phenomena was observed: border ice, total ice cover, frazil ice, ice floes, or an ice jam. The “Total ice cover (temporal)” sheet contains the annual number of days with total ice cover recorded at selected stations during 1950–2020. The “spatial change” sheet provides decadal statistics on the occurrence of individual river ice phenomena, including the mean number of days with any ice phenomenon, total ice cover, border ice, frazil ice, and ice floes. A NaN value for a given decade indicates that no information on river ice phenomena was available for that period. All years are reported as hydrological years, beginning on 1 November and ending on 31 October of the following calendar year. The creation of the dataset was funded in whole or in part by the National Science Centre, Poland (grant no. 2025/57/N/ST10/00545).