Comparison of high-resolution climate reanalysis datasets for hydro-climatic impact studies

Wood, Raul R.; Janzing, Joren; van Hamel, Amber; Götte, Jonas; Schumacher, Dominik L.; Brunner, Manuela I.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-4153-2025

Articles | Volume 29, issue 17

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-4153-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-4153-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 29, issue 17

Research article

|

08 Sep 2025

Research article |

| 08 Sep 2025

Comparison of high-resolution climate reanalysis datasets for hydro-climatic impact studies

Raul R. Wood, Joren Janzing, Amber van Hamel, Jonas Götte, Dominik L. Schumacher, and Manuela I. Brunner

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-4153-2025-supplement

Data sets

ERA5 hourly data on single levels from 1940 to present H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47

ERA5-Land hourly data from 1950 to present Muñoz Sabater https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.e2161bac

CERRA sub-daily regional reanalysis data for Europe on single levels from 1984 to present S. Schimanke et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.622a565a

CERRA-Land sub-daily regional reanalysis data for Europe from 1984 to present A. Verrelle et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.a7f3cd0b

Climatologies at high resolution for the earth’s land surface areas D. N. Karger et al. https://doi.org/10.16904/ENVIDAT.228

Catchment attributes and hydro-meteorological time series for large-sample studies across hydrologic Switzerland (CAMELS-CH) (0.6) M. Höge et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7957061

Model code and software

xclim: xarray-based climate data analytics (v0.44.0) P. Bourgault et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8075481

Short summary

Continuous and high-quality meteorological datasets are crucial to study extreme hydro-climatic events. We here conduct a comprehensive spatio-temporal evaluation of precipitation and temperature for four climate reanalysis datasets, focusing on mean and extreme metrics, variability, trends, and the representation of droughts and floods over Switzerland. Our analysis shows that all datasets have some merit when limitations are considered, and that one dataset performs better than the others.