A Sharper Look at the World’s Rivers and Catchments

Kurzfassung

Rivers are the arteries of the planet, providing vital resources as they flow and pulse across landscapes in a vast global network. Rivers and streams convey sediments and nutrients to fertile valleys and river deltas, create habitat corridors and transportation routes, and deliver life-sustaining fresh water to aquatic and riparian ecosystems and to human populations. In the absence of a universally accepted digital global river network, the HydroSHEDS database has emerged in the past decade as the most frequently applied global hydrographic mapping product, supporting a large and growing community of users. Soon this community will have access to a new version of HydroSHEDS offering expanded capabilities and promising clearer views of Earth’s arteries. HydroSHEDS version 2 (also called HydroSHEDS-X), currently under development, will offer substantial revisions and improvements on version 1 while following the same design characteristics to ensure maximum compatibility between versions and to related products. The new version is derived from the TanDEM-X (TerraSAR-X add-on for digital elevation measurement) global elevation model, which was created in partnership between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Airbus, and is superior to the SRTM DEM in several ways. The elevation data of TanDEM-X were produced at an original resolution of 12 meters, and they cover the entire global land surface area, including northern latitudes. To enhance the quality of results while retaining spatial compatibility, HydroSHEDS-X has been created from the original, nonpublic 12-meter-resolution version of TanDEM-X, yet it will be released at the same 3-arc-second resolution as HydroSHEDS version 1. This approach ensures fully global, homogeneous coverage, including of areas above 60°N latitude, at substantially improved quality due to both the finer resolution of the underpinning DEM and the reduced need to fill data gaps compared with the SRTM data.