Appendix 2: Hindu Kush-Himalaya database
Last updated
Last updated
Download link:
Database extent:
Xmin: 65.00 Xmax: 100.0 Ymin: 20.0 Ymax: 40.0
HydroSheds SRTM DEM
The included Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is the USGS HydroSheds hydrologically conditioned DEM (Lehner et al., 2006). The data is based on the SRTM DEM and public available through . The specific product included is "Hydrologically conditioned elevation". This product is available divided in 5°x5° tiles. Parts of the tiles have been mosaicked to generate the DEM as in Figure X.
Hydrosheds streams
Hydrosheds also has streamlines available as derived from the hydrologically corrected DEM. The data is available as lines shapefile. The data is derived from the 15 arc seconds DEM.
Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI v6.0)
ESA CCI Land Use data
As part of the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI), the Land Cover project is concerned with the generation of the land cover ECV. Land cover is defined as the physical material at the surface of the earth. Land covers include grass, asphalt, trees, bare ground, water, etc.
The ESA CCI project’s objective is to critically revisit all algorithms required for the generation of a global land product in the light of GCOS requirements, and to design and demonstrate a prototype system delivering in a consistent way over years and from various EO instruments global land cover information matching the needs of key users’ belonging to the climate change community. The focus is placed on the ESA and Member States missions providing near daily global surface reflectance observation at moderate spatial resolution (MERIS FR & RR, SPOT VEGETATION) but the contribution of ESA SAR sensors will also be investigated to tackle specific land cover discrimination issue.
HiHydrosoil
Latitude
SPHY requires each grid cell’s latitude for the calculation of the reference evapotranspiration using the Modified-Hargreaves equation (Droogers and Allen, 2002). The latitude is derived for a 0.01° x 0.01° grid covering the dataset domain.
Watch Forcing Data ERA-INTERIM (WFDEI)
The WFDEI dataset (Weedon et al., 2014) is clipped for the domain covering the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region, including the downstream basins of Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra. The data only covers grid cells classified as land, grid cells located in the sea are not included. Initially the Refined High Asia Reanalysis (HAR, (Maussion et al., 2014)) was selected. However, this dataset misses the western part of the upper Indus basins and was therefore considered not to be useful to be included in this dataset. Experiences from ICIMOD’s HI-AWARE and Upper Indus basin project showed that the Watch Forcing ERA Interim dataset (WFDEI, (Weedon et al., 2014)), with precipitation data corrected using the GPCC dataset (Schneider et al., 2013) seems to be the most suitable large-scale dataset available.
Daily mean air temperature:
Daily maximum air temperature:
Daily minimum air temperature:
Daily precipitation:
The Randolph Glacier inventory (Pfeffer et al., 2014) is considered the most complete global glacier outlines inventory. The inventory is available online through GLIMS: . Version 6.0 was released in July 2017. The outlines for three regions are included in the dataset: Central Asia, South Asia West, South Asia east (Figure 73).
FutureWater has developed a new global soil product containing quantitative hydrological properties, as required by most hydrological models, including SPHY (Simon et al., 2015). This database based on SoilGrids250 contains a comprehensive inventory of soil hydraulic variables in gridded format. It is available at the global level, with a spatial resolution of 250 meters. Pedotransfer functions are used to estimate physical soil properties from soil type. A detailed description of the HiHydrosoil product can be found on the FutureWater website .
