Integrated Hydrological Units of the United Kingdom: Catchments
(IHU Catchments)
This dataset is part of Integrated Hydrological Units (IHU) of the UK, a set of geographical reference units for hydrological purposes including river flow measurement and hydrometric data collection. This dataset was derived from the Integrated Hydrological Terrain Model. A Catchment represents the full area upstream from a Section outlet, which is a cell upstream of a confluence of two watercourses with known names. While Sections do not overlap, Catchments can overlap because one Catchment contains Catchments for all upstream Sections. This layer currently covers Great Britain only as no dataset with river geometries and names with suitable detail is available for Northern Ireland.
Publication date: 2015-02-05
View record as
Format
File geodatabase
Spatial information
- Study area
-
- Spatial representation type
- Vector
- Spatial reference system
- OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
Temporal information
- Temporal extent
-
2014-08-20 to …
Provenance & quality
The main inputs for development of Integrated Hydrological Units (IHU) of the UK were data held by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Specifically, the cumulative catchment area raster and outflow raster from the Integrated Hydrological Digital Terrain Model (IHDTM) [1]. The vast majority of the watercourse names come from the subset of CEH UK river centreline network enriched by names from Ordnance Survey 1:50K Gazetteer [2]. Some names were obtained from or verified using other readily available sources like OpenStreetMap (openstreetmap.org) and WikiPedia (wikipedia.org). Bespoke FORTRAN functions, part of the CEH Flood Estimation Handbook code set, were used for catchment delineation. These functions enable sensible interlocking catchments boundaries to be created for the whole IHDTM surface. The option that does not leave gaps between catchments was specified [1]. Except for the catchment delineation, ArcGIS was used as the main GIS platform. Custom Python code was developed to drive the whole process and to perform hierarchical and network tasks. The full name of each IHU Section was derived from three rivers defining the section: the largest (in terms of cumulative catchment area) inflowing river other than the main river in the Section, the main river in the Section, and the largest river flowing into the downstream Section. If no such inflows exist, words'Source', 'Sea', or the name of the main river in the downstream Section are used as appropriate. A similar approach was adopted for IHU Group names, although group names were edited manually to a great extent to ensure they are simple and readily understood.
[1] Morris, D.G. and Flavin, R.W. 1990. A Digital Terrain Model for Hydrology. Proc 4th Int. Symposium on Spatial Data Handling. Zurich, 1, 250-262.
[2] Moore R V, Morris D G and Flavin R W, 1994. Sub-set of UK digital 1:50,000 scale river centreline network. NERC, Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford.
[1] Morris, D.G. and Flavin, R.W. 1990. A Digital Terrain Model for Hydrology. Proc 4th Int. Symposium on Spatial Data Handling. Zurich, 1, 250-262.
[2] Moore R V, Morris D G and Flavin R W, 1994. Sub-set of UK digital 1:50,000 scale river centreline network. NERC, Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford.
Related
Services associated with this dataset
Integrated Hydrological Units of the United Kingdom View Service
This dataset is included in the following collections
Supplemental information
National River Flow Archive website providing access to river flow data downloads as well as contact information for the NRFA enquirers service which provides other datasets and monthly, annual and occasional reports on river flow conditions.
Correspondence/contact details
Matt Fry
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Maclean Building, Benson Lane, Crowmarsh Gifford
Wallingford
Oxfordshire
OX10 8BB
UNITED KINGDOM
enquiries@ceh.ac.uk
Wallingford
Oxfordshire
OX10 8BB
UNITED KINGDOM
Authors
Kral, F.
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1142-4039 Other contacts
- Custodian
-
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centreinfo@eidc.ac.uk
- Publisher
-
NERC Environmental Information Data Centreinfo@eidc.ac.uk