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Datasets / Rivers

RiversObservations

SWORD SWOT River Database

SWOT River Database, version 17b. 10 km river reaches and 200 m nodes for rivers wider than 30 m.

The prior river network behind SWOT river products, built from GRWL centerlines, MERIT Hydro and HydroBASINS. Reaches and nodes carry width, slope, topology and the identifiers used in SWOT data, so observations can be joined to river lines. Files are split by continent and HydroBASINS level 2.

Source
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Zenodo
Resolution
Reaches (about 10 km) and nodes (200 m)
Data type
Lines and points
Time span
Static (v17b, 2025)
Temporal
Static
Access type
Direct download (external)
Formats
Shapefile, GeoPackage, NetCDF
Coverage
Global (rivers wider than 30 m) (-180, -60, 180, 84)
Licence
CC BY 4.0
DOI
10.5281/zenodo.15299138
Provider page
www.swordexplorer.com/

Cite as. Altenau, E. H., et al. (2021). The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission River Database (SWORD): A Global River Network for Satellite Data Products. Water Resources Research, 57, e2021WR030054. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021WR030054

Access

filesSWORD v17b (each archive holds every continent)

linkSWORD Explorer (browse reaches before downloading)

https://www.swordexplorer.com/

curl -fsSL "https://hydrological.org/api/v1/datasets/sword/links.txt?bbox=-75,-20,-50,5" \
  | xargs -n 1 curl -fLO

Also available as JSON: links · manifest · dataset record