GRQA: Global River Water Quality Archive

Abstract

Large-scale hydrological studies are often limited by the lack of available observation data with a good spatiotemporal coverage. This has affected the reproducibility of previous studies and the potential improvement of existing hydrological models. In addition to the observation data themselves, insufficient or poor-quality metadata have also discouraged researchers from integrating the already-available datasets. Therefore, improving both the availability and quality of open water quality data would increase the potential to implement predictive modeling on a global scale. The Global River Water Quality Archive (GRQA) aims to contribute to improving water quality data coverage by aggregating and harmonizing five national, continental and global datasets: CESI (Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators program), GEMStat (Global Freshwater Quality Database), GLORICH (GLObal RIver CHemistry), Waterbase and WQP (Water Quality Portal). The GRQA compilation involved converting observation data from the five sources into a common format and harmonizing the corresponding metadata, flagging outliers, calculating time series characteristics and detecting duplicate observations from sources with a spatial overlap. The final dataset extends the spatial and temporal coverage of previously available water quality data and contains 42 parameters and over 17 million measurements around the globe covering the 1898–2020 time period. Metadata in the form of statistical tables, maps and figures are provided along with observation time series. The GRQA dataset, supplementary metadata and figures are available for download on the DataCite- and OpenAIRE-enabled Zenodo repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5097436 (Virro et al., 2021).