Special Databases

Our long experience in collecting and harmonising hydrological data and the solid contacts to National Hydrological Services and other owners of hydrological data world-wide attract the interest of trans-national projects and international programmes.

For the water-related programmes of the UN and their specialised agencies or supra-national bodies like the EC, GRDC operates seperate databases like ARDB and EWA, and developes systems of an automated collection, processing and re-distribution of river discharge data in near-real time. The most recent example is the ETN-R.

Arctic Runoff Data Base (ARDB)

In the framework of GRDC cooperation in UN-Programmes and Projects GRDC was involved in Arctic Climate System Study (ACSYS) (and is now involved in its follow-up programme Climate and Cryosphere, CliC). Within the scope of the ACSYS Data and Information Service (ADIS) and the Data and Information Service for CliC (DISC) the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) in Koblenz, Germany, assembled and maintains the Arctic Runoff Data Base (ARDB) as an ACSYS data set in support of research conducted in the framework of the ACSYS programme.

European Water Archive (EWA of EURO-FRIEND)

The European Water Archive is a central feature of European FRIEND as part of the IHP of UNESCO and the HWRP of WMO. Since its inception in 1985, this archive is one of the most comprehensive hydrological archives in Europe, containing daily flow data and station metadata for more than 3700 river gauging stations in around 30 countries. It exclusively serves the scientific research of the members of the European FRIEND Projects. Since 2004 GRDC maintains EWA in support of the European FRIEND programme.

Global Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (GTN-R)

Today, many countries operate national near real-time water level or river discharge transmission schemes. Increasingly, countries also publish this data online, typically on the Websites of their national hydrological services (NHS). Though this is a major step forward, from a global perspective the diversity of data sources is still quite heterogeneous. Here GRDC aims at providing an additional service, called GTN-R. The basic idea of the GTN-R project is to draw together the already available heterogeneous real-time discharge data provided by individual NHS and to redistribute it in a harmonised way.

European Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (ETN-R)

The European Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (ETN-R) is an information infrastructure for the automated collection, quality control and redistribution of near real-time river discharge and water level data from 30 European national and trans-boundary river basins, involving in total 35 countries. The results of the project will primarily improve the forecasts of the European Flood Alert System (EFAS) research project conducted at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC). Many of the achievements made during the three year project (2006-2008) will contribute to the GRDC project Global Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (GTN-R).

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