Design of Total Runoff Integrating Pathways (TRIP)—A Global River Channel Network

Abstract

As a first step toward designing a comprehensive model for validating land surface hydrology and river flow in Earth system models, a global river channel network has been prepared at 1° latitude ? 1° longitude resolution. The end product is the Total Runoff Integrating Pathways (TRIP) network. The aim of TRIP is to provide information of lateral water movement over land following the paths of river channels. Flow directions were determined from vector data of river channels and river pathways available in two recent atlases; however, an automatic procedure using a digital elevation map of the corresponding horizontal resolution was used as a first guess. In this way, a template to convert the river discharge data into mean runoff per unit area of the basin has been obtained. One hundred eighty major rivers are identified and adequately resolved; they cover 63% of land, excluding Antarctica and Greenland. Most of the river basin sizes are well within a 20% difference of published values, with a root-mean-square error of approximately 10%. Furthermore, drainage areas for more than 400 gauging stations were delineated. Obviously, the stream lengths in TRIP are shorter than the natural lengths published as data. This is caused by the meandering of rivers in the real world. Meandering ratio (rM), the ratio of actual (published) river length to the idealized river length, has been calculated. Averaged globally for all available data, rM is 1.4, although it is 1.3 for rivers with areas larger than 500,000 km2. The rM data will be useful in the design of the Scheme for Total Runoff Integrating Pathways (STRIP). In the current form, TRIP can be used as a template for producing a time series of river flow using a simple version of STRIP.