FullBasin
MERIT-FullBasin processes the entire MERIT Hydro grid — 75 billion cells, 22 billion land pixels — as one seamless domain, and releases three tiers: basins and regions — 340,991 basins above 1 km² covering more than 99.5% of global land, grouped into 96 regions, each closed against its own outlet, with basin and region masks plus attribute tables (the outlet inventory keeps every outlet down to single coastal pixels, so the partition is complete); a per-pixel flow-tree index (depth-first entry/exit timestamps that turn any upstream query into two integer comparisons); and 16 upstream terrain and shape attributes at every pixel above 10 km².
The data page shows the region and basin levels on an interactive map, linked to their tables, together with the MERIT Hydro tile grid — so you can see exactly which base tiles a region needs before you download anything.
A long-term effort by Lulu Jiang to describe the world's rivers completely and consistently — from whole drainage basins down to every hillslope and channel pixel.
FullHydro's first release is FullBasin; further products are in preparation and will appear here as soon as they are ready. Lulu began this work after completing her postdoctoral research and has since carried it out independently — the algorithms, the code, the processing and the auditing are her own. It continues as a collaboration with Prof. Huan Wu at the Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology (NUIST), who supervised the research this project grew out of and is the corresponding author; the papers are therefore submitted through his group, with NUIST as the first affiliation. Co-authors Weitian Chen, Zhijun Huang and Ting Yang contributed to the FullBasin work and paper, which is currently in open discussion at Earth System Science Data.
This site is deliberately simple for now — its job is to help you find, download and use the data. It will keep growing as new products and tools are released.
Lulu is currently an independent researcher based near Paris and is open to opportunities in academia and industry in hydrology, global hydrography and geospatial data science — ideally in the Paris area, where her family lives, or fully remote. Questions, corrections and collaborations: [email protected].
dir, elv, upa, upg, wth, hnd — please obtain them from the MERIT Hydro team. FullBasin provides the region and basin masks, and tells you exactly which MERIT Hydro tiles to download for the area you work on.