Data Downloads

This page provides the ability to download available time series data for all administrative and basin boundaries. This includes five-year rolling annual averages which can be used to track long-term change in water-related ecosystems. The five-year rolling average time series available on this page directly feed into the the official reporting on Sustainable Development Goal indicator 6.6.1 which can also be accessed in the Global SDG database.

License

All data here is produced under the Copernicus Programme and is provided free of charge, without restriction of use. For the full license information see the Copernicus Regulation.

Publications, models and data products that make use of these datasets must include proper acknowledgement, including citing datasets and the journal article as in the following citation.

Citation

Jean-Francois Pekel, Andrew Cottam, Noel Gorelick, Alan S. Belward, High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes. Nature 540, 418-422 (2016). (doi:10.1038/nature20584)

If you are using the data as a layer in a published map, please include the following attribution text: 'Source: EC JRC/Google'

Tabular CSV Downloads

Global tabular comma separated value data for each aggregation.

GeoTiffs

Geotiffs are available for each country based on GAUL 0 boundaries. Each country is a collection of 4 different types of GeoTiffs with data from 2000-2018. Larger countries are split into a series of tiles.

Types of GeoTiffs for each country:


1. Baseline Class. One file. Contains the majority of the seasonality observed across the reference period 2000-2004.


2. Baseline Counts. One file. Contains the counts of the classes occurrence in the reference period 2000-2004. The file has 4 bands:

    • Band 1: classUnknown_count (i.e. No data count)
    • Band 2: classNoWaterYear_count (i.e. Land count)
    • Band 3: classSeasonal_count
    • Band 4: classPermanent_count

3. Transition. One file. The Water Transitions map documents changes in water state between the majority class in the reference period (2000-2004) and the class of last year of observation. Following are the 11 transitions classes:

Values Description

    • 0 No change
    • 1 Permanent
    • 2 New permanent
    • 3 Lost permanent
    • 4 Seasonal
    • 5 New seasonal
    • 6 Lost seasonal
    • 7 Seasonal to permanent
    • 8 Permanent to seasonal
    • 9 Ephemeral permanent
    • 10 Ephemeral seasonal

4. Classifications 2000-2018. One file per year. This Yearly Seasonality Classification collection contains annula seasonality maps. Each file has one band with 4 possible values:

Values Description data

    • 1 Not water (i.e. Land)
    • 2 Seasonal water
    • 3 Permanent water

All files. A zip file containing all of the associated files for a country. If you download this file, you do not need to download the individual files in the following columns. They are provided if you do not wish to download all years or are having trouble downloading large files and prefer to do a series of smaller ones.

SDG661 downloads