Spatially resolved meteorological and ancillary data in Central Europe for rainfall streamflow modeling

Abstract

We present a gridded dataset for rainfall streamflow modeling that is fully spatially resolved and covers five complete river basins in central Europe: upper Danube, Elbe, Oder, Rhine, and Weser (https://doi.org/10.4211/hs.d7f2cbb587ab4a75ac7987854e8f62ca, Vischer et al., 2025a). We compiled meteorological forcings and a variety of ancillary information on soil, rock, land cover, and orography. The data is harmonized to a regular 9 km × 9 km grid, temporal resolution is daily from 1980 to 2024. We also provide code to further combine our dataset with publicly available river discharge data for end-to-end rainfall streamflow modeling. We have used this data to demonstrate how neural network-driven hydrological modeling can be taken beyond lumped catchments, and want to facilitate direct comparisons between different model types.