Past and future discharge and stream temperature at high spatial resolution in a large European basin (Loire basin, France)

Abstract

This paper presents retrospective simulations (1963-2019) and future projections (1976-2100) of daily time series of discharge and stream temperature for 52 278 reaches (median length of 1.3 km) over the Loire River basin (105 km2) in France, using a physical process-based thermal model coupled with a semi-distributed hydrological model. Retrospective simulations are based on the 8 km gridded Safran meteorological reanalysis over France. Twenty-first century projections are based on a subset of the 8 km gridded and bias-corrected DRIAS-2020 dataset over France. The discharge and stream temperature dataset stands out from existing ones thanks to its large scale and its high spatial resolution and the use of a physical process-based thermal model. The whole dataset is freely available and can be downloaded in NetCDF format from 10.57745/LBPGFS.