GRQA: Global River Water Quality Archive
Holger Virro, Giuseppe Amatulli, Alexander Kmoch, Longzhu Q. Shen, Evelyn Uuemaa
Abstract
Abstract. A major problem related to global water quality analysis and modelling has been the lack of available good quality and consistent water quality measurement datasets with a global spatial coverage. Current study aims to contribute into improving the global datasets on water quality by aggregating and harmonizing five national, continental and global datasets: CESI, GEMSTAT, GLORICH, WATERBASE and WQP. 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 16 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 repository of the University of Tartu, DataDOI, http://dx.doi.org/10.23673/re-273 (Virro et al., 2021).