Barker, L.J.; Smith, K.A.; Svensson, C.; Tanguy, M.; Hannaford, J.

Historic Standardised Streamflow Index (SSI) using Tweedie distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for 303 UK catchments (1891-2015)

https://doi.org/10.5285/58ef13a9-539f-46e5-88ad-c89274191ff9 Cite this dataset

This dataset contains the Standardised Streamflow Index (SSI) data for 303 catchments across the United Kingdom from 1891 to 2015. The SSI is a drought index based on the cumulative probability of a given monthly mean streamflow occurring for a given catchment. Here, the SSI is calculated for the following accumulation periods: 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months. Each accumulation period is calculated for calendar end-months. The standard period used to fit the Tweedie distribution is 1961-2010.

The SSI was produced by the RCUK-funded Historic Droughts project in order to characterise and explore hydrological drought severity over the period 1891-2015. This dataset is an outcome of the Historic Droughts Project (grant number: NE/L01016X/1).

Publication date: 2018-03-12

Format

Comma-separated values (CSV)

Spatial information

Study area
Spatial representation type: Tabular (text)
Spatial reference system: OSGB 1936 / British National Grid

Temporal information

Temporal extent: 1891-01-01 to 2015-11-01

Provenance & quality

The SSI is calculated as defined in Svensson, et al., (2017 https://doi.org/ 10.1002/2016WR019276) and is based on the cumulative probability of a given monthly mean streamflow occurring for a given catchment. Here the SSI is calculated for the following accumulation periods: 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18 and 24 months. The Tweedie distribution was fitted to each accumulated time series of monthly mean flows. The 'SCI' package for R was used to calculate the SSI and a new function was written to enable the SCI package to call the 'tweedie' package for R. The input data used is monthly mean streamflow derived from modelled reconstructed streamflow (Smith et al., 2018 https://doi.org/10.5285/f710bed1-e564-47bf-b82c-4c2a2fe2810e). Data were exported in comma separated value files (.csv format) and ingested into the EIDC.

This dataset is included in the following collections

Historic droughts: hydro-meteorological data outputs

Citations

West, H., Quinn, N., & Horswell, M. (2022). Spatio-temporal propagation of North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) rainfall deviations to streamflow in British catchments. In Hydrological Sciences Journal (Vol. 67, Issue 5, pp. 676–688). Informa UK Limited https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2022.2038791

Smith, K.A., Barker, L.J., Tanguy, M., Parry, S., Harrigan, S., Legg, T.P., Prudhomme, C., & Hannaford, J. (2019). A multi-objective ensemble approach to hydrological modelling in the UK: an application to historic drought reconstruction. In Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (Vol. 23, Issue 8, pp. 3247–3268). Copernicus GmbH. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-3247-2019

Barker, L.J., Hannaford, J., Parry, S., Smith, K.A., Tanguy, M., & Prudhomme, C. (2019). Historic hydrological droughts 1891-2015: systematic characterisation for a diverse set of catchments across the UK.Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 23(11), 4583-4602. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-4583-2019

Correspondence/contact details

Lucy Barker

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

Maclean Building, Benson Lane, Crowmarsh Gifford
Wallingford
Oxfordshire
OX10 8BB
UNITED KINGDOM

enquiries@ceh.ac.uk