Land2Sea database of river drainage basin sizes, annual water discharges, and suspended sediment fluxes

[1] The Land2Sea database contains data on the sizes of 1519 exorheic river drainage basins (79% of the exorheic land area), annual suspended sediment fluxes (593 rivers, 63% of the exorheic land area), and water discharges (1272 rivers, 76% of the exorheic land area) that have been compiled from a variety of sources. The database extends earlier compilations, such as GEMS/GLORI. The river basins are grouped into 19 large-scale drainage regions to investigate the regional variability in freshwater and sediment fluxes to various ocean basins. The annual suspended sediment flux to the coastal ocean ( 18.5 10 tons) is dominated by east Asia (6.1 10 tons); Arabia, India, and southeast Asia (4.3 10 tons); and eastern South America (2.4 10 tons). Small topical islands of Oceania support the highest annual sediment fluxes per drainage area ( 9650 t km 2 a ). Annual freshwater discharge to the coastal ocean ( 38,857 km) is dominated by runoff from eastern South America (11,199 km); east Asia (7114 km); and Arabia, India, and southeast Asia (4384 km). The empirical data agree well with results from global models (ARTandBQART) that have been trained on a subset of the data compiled here.