Global River Topology (GRIT) ...

• Main Authors: Wortmann, Michel, Slater, Louise, Hawker, Laurence, Liu, Yinxue, Neal, Jeffrey
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Zenodo 2024
• Subjects: river network; hydrography; river bifurcations; Greenland; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8322965; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.8322965

The Global River Topology (GRIT) is a vector-based, global river network that not only represents the tributary components of the global drainage network but also the distributary ones, including multi-thread rivers, canals and delta distributaries. It is also the first global hydrography (excl. Antarctica and Greenland) produced at 30m raster resolution. It is created by merging Landsat-based river mask (GRWL) with elevation-generated streams to ensure a homogeneous drainage density outside of the river mask (rivers narrower than approx. 30m). Crucially, it uses a new 30m digital terrain model (FABDEM, based on TanDEM-X) that shows greater accuracy over the traditionally used SRTM derivatives. After vectorisation and pruning, directionality is assigned by a combination of elevation, flow angle, heuristic and continuity approaches (based on RivGraph). The network topology (lines and nodes, upstream/downstream IDs) is available as layers and attribute information in the GeoPackage files (readable by ...