The Global Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (GTN-R): Near Real-Time Data Acquisition and Dissemination Tool for Online River Discharge and Water Level Information

Abstract

Today, many countries operate national near-real-time water level or river discharge transmission schemes. Increasingly, countries also publish this data online, typically by way of web sites of their national hydrological services (NHS). Though this is a major step forward, from a global perspective the diversity of data sources is still quite heterogeneous. Consequently, it still remains a tedious task to draw together all information needed for global assessments and models. Here GRDC aims at providing an additional service, called Global Terrestrial Network for River Discharge (GTN-R). The basic idea of the GTN-R project is to draw together the already available heterogeneous information on near real time river discharge data provided by individual National Hydrological Services and redistribute it in a harmonized way. GRDC has identified a priority network of 377 river discharge reference stations that constitute the first application network for GTN-R. The core of GTN-R is a software that collects near-real-time (NRT)-discharge data from distributed servers in the internet, harmonizes and summarizes it, and makes it available again in one standard format via a FTP-server. On the mid to long term, it will be necessary to overcome such tedious approaches and to arrive at internationally agreed standards for the exchange of metadata and data on measurements of geophysical and biogeochemical processes in general.