Identification

Title

Integrated Hydrological Units of the United Kingdom: Sections

Abstract

This dataset is part of Integrated Hydrological Units (IHU) of the UK, a set of geographical reference units for hydrological purposes including river flow measurement and hydrometric data collection. A Section is the drainage area of a watercourse between two confluences. Only confluences of named watercourses were considered. Each Section carries a name constructed from names of the major river flowing through the Section, the major river flowing into the Section, and the major river into which the Section flows. Sections are spatially consistent with Groups: each Group is made up of one or more Section. Each Section is associated with one Catchment representing the full area upstream from the Section outlet. Identifiers and attributes have been calculated so that direct upstream and direct downstream IHU units can be selected. This layer currently covers Great Britain only as no dataset with river geometries and names with suitable detail is available for Northern Ireland. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/a6e37e39-9e10-4647-a110-12d902403095

Resource type

dataset

Resource locator

https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/data/a6e37e39-9e10-4647-a110-12d902403095

description: Download a copy of this data

function: download

https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/sd/a6e37e39-9e10-4647-a110-12d902403095.zip

description: Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset.

function: information

https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/maps/cca47088-8cdd-4d7a-86b4-90f0a1766364?request=getCapabilities&service=WMS

description: This link returns a WMS GetCapabilities response in XML format

Unique resource identifier

code

1425380883797

codeSpace

CEH:EIDC:

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

inlandWaters

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Hydrography

originating controlled vocabulary

title

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2008-06-01

Keyword set

keyword value

originating controlled vocabulary

title

GeoNames

reference date

date type

creation

effective date

2006-01-01

Keyword set

keyword value

catchment

watershed

hydrology

Great Britain

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

-8.648

East bounding longitude

1.768

North bounding latitude

60.861

South bounding latitude

49.864

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

2014-08-20

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2015-02-05

date type

creation

effective date

2014-08-20

Frequency of update

irregular

Quality and validity

Lineage

The main inputs for development of Integrated Hydrological Units (IHU) of the UK were data held by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Specifically, the cumulative catchment area raster and outflow raster from the Integrated Hydrological Digital Terrain Model (IHDTM) [1]. The vast majority of the watercourse names come from the subset of CEH UK river centreline network enriched by names from Ordnance Survey 1:50K Gazetteer [2]. Some names were obtained from or verified using other readily available sources like OpenStreetMap (openstreetmap.org) and WikiPedia (wikipedia.org). Bespoke FORTRAN functions, part of the CEH Flood Estimation Handbook code set, were used for catchment delineation. These functions enable sensible interlocking catchments boundaries to be created for the whole IHDTM surface. The option that does not leave gaps between catchments was specified [1]. Except for the catchment delineation, ArcGIS was used as the main GIS platform. Custom Python code was developed to drive the whole process and to perform hierarchical and network tasks. The full name of each IHU Section was derived from three rivers defining the section: the largest (in terms of cumulative catchment area) inflowing river other than the main river in the Section, the main river in the Section, and the largest river flowing into the downstream Section. If no such inflows exist, words 'Source', 'Sea', or the name of the main river in the downstream Section are used as appropriate. A similar approach was adopted for IHU Group names, although group names were edited manually to a great extent to ensure they are simple and readily understood. [1] Morris, D.G. and Flavin, R.W. 1990. A Digital Terrain Model for Hydrology. Proc 4th Int. Symposium on Spatial Data Handling. Zurich, 1, 250-262. [2] Moore R V, Morris D G and Flavin R W, 1994. Sub-set of UK digital 1:50,000 scale river centreline network. NERC, Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford.

Conformity

Conformity report

specification

title

Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services

publisher

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

organisation name

Environmental Information Data Centre

full postal address

Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg

Lancaster

LA1 4AP

email address

info@eidc.ac.uk

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2021-06-25T18:44:52

Metadata language

eng