CAMELS dataset in NetCDF/Feather formats

Motivation

The CAMELS datasets are now provided in an ideal format and takes a bit of data processing to convert them to useful and convenient dataframes. So, I decided to use the beloved netcdf and feather formats to make the dataset more accessible!

Usage

First make sure that h5netcdf, geopandas, xarray, and requests Python packages are installed, then load the files directly like so:

import io

import geopandas as gpd
import requests
import xarray as xr

r = requests.get("https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/cheginit/camels_netcdf/main/camels_attributes_v2.0.feather")
attrs = gpd.read_feather(io.BytesIO(r.content))

r = requests.get("https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/cheginit/camels_netcdf/main/camels_attrs_v2_streamflow_v1p2.nc")
qobs = xr.open_dataset(io.BytesIO(r.content), engine="h5netcdf")

Methodology

This repo contains the code that I used to generate the datasets. Two data sources are available from the CAMELS dataset:

Streamflow observations for all 671 stations in the CAMELS dataset.
All the watershed attributes (camels_attributes_v2.0).

The camel_netcdf.py generate two files:

camels_attributes_v2.0.feather: Includes basin geometries and 60 basin-level attributes that are available in CAMELS.
camels_attrs_v2_streamflow_v1p2.nc: A xarray.Dataset that includes streamflow observations for all 671 stations, as well as the 60 basin-level attributes.

Additionally, the script takes care of some small annoyances in the dataset:

Station names didn't have a consistent format and there were some missing commas and extra periods! Now, the names have a consistent format (title) and there is comma before the states.
Station IDs and HUC 02 are strings with leading zero if needed.

Although, the generated netcdf and feather files are available in this repo, you can recreate them locally using mambaforge (or conda) like so:

mamba env create -f environment.yml
conda activate camels
chmod +x ./camels_netcdf.py
./camels_netcdf.py

Example Plots

Snow fraction using camels_attributes_v2.0.feather: $camels_snow_fraction$

The dataset camels_attrs_v2_streamflow_v1p2.nc:

Streamflow observations for USGS-01013500:

Contributions