Input data set: Inter basin water transfer

Interbasin water transfer (IBWT) projects abstract water from the lakes, rivers, and other sources and deliver it over extended distances for different purposes such as irrigation, domestic supply, energy production, navigation, industrial development, flood control, etc. (Shumilova et al., 2018; Sternberg, 2014)

The list of the existing projects was extracted from Shumilova et al. (2018) and Hanasaki et al. (2018). By keeping these two lists as references, a total of 40 existing IBWT systems were selected and digitised each of them using the QGIS application. The longitude and latitude of the origin, destination, and route for each of the IBWT projects were extracted for global modelling applications. Further, their detailed information, such as the year the canal operation started, continent, country, province, exact origin, destination, length, annual carrying capacity, construction cost, purposes, etc., were also documented.

For the IBWT systems under construction and planning, the list from Shumilova et al. (2018) was used. A total of 27 systems were selected as “under construction” and 49 systems under the category of “under planning”. The 19 IBWT systems under construction category were modified (in terms of their origin, route, and destination) either completely or partially from that of Shumilova et al. (2018) due to the errors involved in their geographical location and route. These modified IBWT systems were digitised using the QGIS application. In the same way, 20 IBWT systems under planning category were also modified. Besides, the origin, destination, and route for each of the canal systems (both under construction and planning) were extracted and documented for the global model applications. Lastly, all these inventories were converted into 0.5° × 0.5° grid format netCDF files to make them compatible with the DDM30 global flow direction map and to use in grid-based global simulations. As an additional note, many IBWT projects originate from the same grid cell, so that their combined capacity should be considered for modelling.