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Datasets / Rivers

RiversFlow

MERIT-Basins

Vector river network and catchments from MERIT Hydro. 2.94 million river reaches with unit catchments.

MERIT Hydro vectorised into river reaches and matching unit catchments, organised in 61 Pfafstetter level 2 basins. The network behind the GRADES flow reconstruction and many large-scale routing models; a translation table links it to SWORD (MERIT-SWORD).

Source
Princeton University (Reach Hydro)
Resolution
Lines (catchments above 25 km²)
Data type
Lines and polygons
Time span
Static (v1.0)
Temporal
Static
Access type
Direct download (external)
Formats
Shapefile (per Pfafstetter level 2 basin)
Coverage
Global land (60°S – 90°N) (-180, -60, 180, 90)
Licence
See provider terms
Provider page
www.reachhydro.org/home/params/merit-basins

Cite as. Lin, P., et al. (2019). Global reconstruction of naturalized river flows at 2.94 million reaches. Water Resources Research, 55, 6499–6516. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019WR025287

Access

linkMERIT-SWORD translation tables (Zenodo)

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13183883

curl "https://hydrological.org/api/v1/datasets/merit-basins/links?bbox=-75,-20,-50,5" \
  -H "Accept: application/json"

Also available as JSON: links · manifest · dataset record