Swiss hydrological data

NEW 05. 06. 2024: The Swiss CAMELS-CH data set is online, featuring daily discharge data for most national gauges, with meteorological time series and catchment attributes:

• CAMELS-CH: https://zenodo.org/records/10354485, corresponding manuscript: https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5755/2023/essd-15-5755-2023.pdf, GitHub: https://github.com/camels-ch/camel

This wiki has been set-up by Bettina Schaefli  (contact) to collect information on data available for hydrological research in Switzerland. The information is collected for research purposes for Swiss and international researchers (with some specific information for EPFL and UNIL colleagues).

The general entry point for hydrological data in Switzerland is the hydrological data portal, www.hydrodaten.admin.ch of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN or BAFU in German).

There is also a general overview page of water-related geodata available at the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, FOEN, link.

Attention: their river information system GEWISS has been integrated into map.geo.admin.ch (see here).

Another important general resource is the Swiss hydrological atlas (for available data to download in form of text files, see here the printed version).

The entry point for hydrologic information about Switzerland for the general public is the Swiss Water Portal.

This listing is not complete, information is given as far as known by the author and selected according to her experience (comments and additional information very welcome!).

Please contact Bettina Schaefli (link above) if you would like to add a resource.

Currently available pages are:

• Discharge data (including water temperature and lake level stations)
  • Hydrological regimes & monthly river flows throughout Switzerland
• Groundwater data
• Meteorological data resources
• Snow observation resources
• Spatial data on catchment characteristics / climate regions
  • Bio-geographic climate regions (from opendata.swiss)
  • Digital Atlas of Switzerland
• Glacier observation resources
• Experimental catchments and other experiments
• Climate change simulations: HydroCH2018
• Data sharing and crowd sourcing initiatives.
• Hydropower
• Peer-reviewed papers
• Other Swiss hydro links

Discharge data from neighbouring countries:

• Discharge data  from Austria (free download of selected data, but no immediate availability, water temperature, lake levels and groundwater observations also available)
• NEW: Hydrological data from France: HydroBanque (free download upon registration, real-time data).

Meteo data from neighbouring countries:

• Meteo for France
• Meteo for Italy
• Meteo data form the German Wetterdienst (CDC Climate Data Center; on the German version you can also follow updates on the available data).

(last modification 28/02/2024; creation: 13 may 2015, sorry for wrong links, data providers keep on changing their webpages)