Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas - Baseline Monthly

Description

This dataset contains baseline water risk indicators at a monthly timestep, with global coverage at the HydroBASINS Level 6 sub-basin scale (polygons). Three indicators are available, all in the physical risk quantity category: baseline water stress, baseline water depletion, and interannual variability. The baseline period is 1979-2019, representing long-term, chronic trends.

Baseline water stress measures the ratio of total water demand to available renewable surface and groundwater supplies. Baseline water depletion measures the ratio of total water consumption to available renewable surface and groundwater supplies. Interannual variability measures the variation in water supply between years.

Usage notes

Variables follow the naming convention {indicator}_{month}_{type}. Indicator codes are: bws (baseline water stress), bwd (baseline water depletion), and iav (interannual variability). Month codes are 01 (January) through 12 (December). Type codes are: raw (original raw indicator value), score (raw value mapped to a 0-5 scale), cat (integer representation of the score for use in visualisations, with values ranging from -1 to 4 depending on indicator; see variable reference tables for category definitions), and label (text description of the category, including its threshold). Three indicators across 12 months and four types give 144 indicator columns in total.

A separate Greenland mask is applied across all variables. Masked sub-basins are encoded as NaN rather than the indicator no_data value. Aqueduct risk indicators cannot be measured directly and have not been validated. This dataset is an update from the 2019 release, which included several improvements to the hydrological inputs of the baseline model. Comparisons with earlier versions of the data should be performed with caution. Aqueduct does not model interbasin transfers.

Variables

Pricing

This dataset has no data acquisition cost.

Resources