Hydrological monitoring data from Coalburn catchment, Northern England, 1967-2022

The Coalburn catchment was first instrumented in 1967 by the Institute of Hydrology (https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/7372/1/IH_133.pdf). The Environment Agency, Forest Research and various NERC and EPSRC grant have enabled continuous measurements to be carried out to the present day. Analysis of the data to 2014 has been carried out (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.07.050).

Originally 13 precipitation storage gauges were installed around the Coalburn catchment; these were reduced to 4 in 1972 and these 4 gauges were used to calculate the Theissen weighted catchment monthly precipitation from 1967 to 2003. In 1992 a Tipping Bucket Raingauge (TBR) was installed by the Environment Agency of at precipitation storage gauge site 12 near the outlet of the catchment. Corrections were made to the entire TBR time series so the aerially averaged monthly precipitation and the TBR over the coincident period (1992–2003) were comparable.

A compound crump weir was installed at the outlet of the Coalburn catchment in 1966. This was replaced in 1991 due to leakage problems which resulted in some poor/missing data prior to 1991. A new central thin plate V notch within a non-standard broad crested weir was installed in August 1991. The original weir used a theoretical rating curve and there was good agreement between this and the gauged discharges. The new weir also uses a theoretical rating curve and excellent agreement has been found between these and the gauged flows.
An automatic weather station (AWS) was installed at Coalburn in 1971 but owing to the remoteness of the site and problems with the equipment there are a considerable number of gaps in its data. The Eskdalemuir weather station is located 45 km north-west of Coalburn at a similar elevation. Data from this location were used for comparison with the AWS at Coalburn and to infill the missing data. Hourly potential evaporation (PET) has been calculated using the Penman–Monteith reference crop evaporation, ET0 , using this meteorological data. Snow depths used measured values from Eskdalemuir. All the data has been quality controlled with missing data infilled from nearby weather stations if possible.