Supporting Datasets produced in Allen et al. (2018) Global Estimates of River Flow Wave Travel Times and Implications for Low-Latency Satellite Data

Supporting datasets for Allen et al. (2018) - Global Estimates of River Flow Wave Travel Times and Implications for Low-Latency Satellite Data, Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1002/2018GL077914 The code used to produce these data is available as a Github repository, permanently hosted on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1219784 Abstract Earth-orbiting satellites provide valuable observations of upstream river conditions worldwide. These observations can be used in real-time applications like early flood warning systems and reservoir operations, provided they are made available to users with sufficient lead time. Yet, the temporal requirements for access to satellite-based river data remain uncharacterized for time-sensitive applications. Here we present a global approximation of flow wave travel time to assess the utility of existing and future low-latency/near-real-time satellite products, with an emphasis on the forthcoming SWOT satellite. We apply a kinematic wave model to a global hydrography dataset and find that global flow waves traveling at their maximum speed take a median travel time of 6, 4 and 3 days to reach their basin terminus, the next downstream city and the next downstream dam respectively. Our findings suggest that a recently-proposed ≤2-day latency for a low-latency SWOT product is potentially useful for real-time river applications. Description of repository datasets: 1. riverPolylines.zip contains ESRI shapefile polylines of river networks with outputs from main analysis. These continental-scale shapefiles contain the following attributes for each river segment: "ARCID" : unique identifier for each river segment line, defined as the river reach between river junctions/heads/mouths. The first 10 attributes are taken from Andreadis et al. (2013): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.61758 "UP_CELLS" : number of upstream cells (pixels) "AREA" : upstream drainage area (km2) "DISCHARGE" : discharge (m3/s) "WIDTH" : mean bankfull river width (m) "WIDTH5" : 5th percentile confidence interval bankfull river width (m) "WIDTH95" : 95th percentile confidence interval bankfull river width (m) "DEPTH" : mean bankfull river depth (m) "DEPTH5" : 5th percentile bankfull river depth (m) "DEPTH95" : 95th percentile confidence bankfull river depth (m) "LENGTH_KM" : segment length (km) "ORIG_FID" : original ID of segment "ELEV_M" : lowest elevation of segment (m). Derived from HydroSHEDS 15 sec hydrologically conditioned DEM: https://hyd