Curating 62 Years of Walnut Gulch Experimental Watershed Data: Improving the Quality of Long-Term Rainfall and Runoff Datasets

The curation of hydrologic data includes quality control, documentation, database development, and provisions for public access. This article describes the development new control procedures experimental watersheds like Walnut Gulch Experimental Watersheds (WGEW). WGEW is a 149 km2 watershed outdoor laboratory equipped with dense network hydro-climatic instruments since 1950s. To improve accuracy from constantly growing instrumentation networks in numerous watersheds, we developed five QAQC tools based on fundamental principles. include visual analysis interpolated rainfall maps evaluating temporal, spatial, quantitative relationships between paired rainfall-runoff events, including runoff lag time, coefficients, multiple regression, association methods. methods identified questionable observations that were not usually captured by existing procedures. evaluated confirmed using metadata, paper charts, graphical visualization tools. It was found 13% days (n = 780) 7% events sampled had errors. Omitting these improved reliability dataset modeling analyses. indicated effectiveness application conventional relations to strategy datasets.