Mean annual climate and watershed properties for 121 reference USGS watersheds

This data release provides the underlying data for Kampf et al., in review: \"Rethinking the role of the water balance in hydrologic research.\" Mean annual climatic variables based on the Northern Hemisphere water year (October 1 to September 30) and several watershed properties are provided for 121 USGS reference watersheds smaller than 1,000 square kilometers. For each climatic variable, mean annual values were derived from watershed average annual values.

The columns of the dataset are as follows:

SP- watershed averaged January 1 to July 1 snow persistence as in Hammond et al., 2018
P_mm - watershed averaged total water year precipitation from PRISM, Daly, 2013
Q_mm - total water year water yield from USGS NWIS
QdivP - runoff ratio, total water year water yield divided by total water year precipitation
PET - watershed averaged total water year potential evapotranspiration from gridMET - Abatzoglou, 2013
PdivPET - the ratio of total water year precipitation to total water year potential evapotranspiration from the sources above.
Elev_mean_m - GAGES-II, Falcone, 2011
Area_km2 - GAGES-II, Falcone, 2011

Abatzoglou, J. T. (2013). Development of gridded surface meteorological data for ecological applications and modelling. International Journal of Climatology, 33(1), 121–131.

Daly, C. (2013). Descriptions of PRISM spatial climate datasets for the conterminous United States (PRISM Doc., 14 p.). Corvallis, OR: PRISM Climate Group, Oregon State University.

Falcone, J. A. (2011). GAGES-II: Geospatial attributes of gages for evaluating streamflow (Digit. Spat. Data set). Reston, VA: U.S. Geological
Survey.

Hammond, J. C., Saavedra, F. A., & Kampf, S. K. (2018). How does snow persistence relate to annual streamflow in mountain watersheds of the Western U.S. with wet maritime and dry continental climates? Water Resources Research, 54, 2605–2623. https://doi.org/10.1002/ 2017WR021899