[DATA CONTRIBUTION] GAGES II about caravan

[thodson-usgs]

Given the size, I thought it best to inquire first.
Also, HYSETS must include a substantial subset of GAGES II, so I'll investigate why they didn't include the whole thing.

[thodson-usgs]

HYSETS claims 14,425 North American watersheds, which makes me think they include all of GAGES II. Yet, Caravan only includes 4621 HYSETS watersheds. Perhaps you've filtered the other GAGES locations based on some other criteria?

[kratzert]

Hi Timothy,

thanks for reaching out and suggesting to add GAGES-II. Last things first: Regarding HYSETS, not sure if they used GAGES-II or not. From a quick glance at their paper they simply grabbed all station data from the USGS streamflow portal. We only included 4621 basins (so far), because we initially only considered basins smaller than 2000km2 for Caravan. This will likely change soon and we could add all of HYSETS (and the other datasets).

That being said, I don't see a problem why we should not have a dedicated GAGES-II extension, since GAGES-II is an established dataset and having a dedicated extension for GAGES-II gauges would facilitate people to run e.g. global models on all stations in GAGES-II without the need to make sure which stations from CAMELS-US/HYSETS are in GAGES-II and which are not.

Also: I have a slight tendency of extensions from the data providers directly, rather than taking data from other published datasets, as it has a stronger signal to the community (at least this is my thought). So "USGS" creating a Caravan extension has a different meaning than "me" grabbing data from a different published dataset and republishing the data in Caravan.

More than 9000 gauges though is a lot to process and even with the provided code still takes some effort (as you would need to download hourly data in csv format from Earth Engine and process these with the second provided notebook locally). I offered this to other groups that are interested in publishing these large amounts of stations, so I will offer the same to you: I can get all meteorological forcings + catchment attributes for you, if you would go ahead and merge the data with streamflow + upload it. If that would be of interest for you, reach out to me via email (I think you should have my mail).

Another thing: In HYSETS we only have data starting 1980, but for another extension that will be published soon, we actually started with data from 1950 (start of ERA5), which we could do here as well and which would add a substantial amount of data to all US gauges.