Gridded Datasets for Climatic and Hydrological Characterization over the Main River Basins in Moroccan Atlas Mountains

Mountainous areas around the world are commonly known as scarce-data regions, mainly due to the inaccessibility of its rugged terrain. It is the case of the Atlas range where the existing ground network is sparse and still insignificant to quantify climate and water variables despite the crucial role of such region in water and ecological management. To overcome this gap of in situ hydro-climatic measurements, a long-distributed time series of snow, precipitation and temperature are extracted from multiple sources and processed within the same temporal and spatial window. The snow cover time series were generated from MODIS satellite sensor data using a cloud filter algorithm. The air temperature datasets are extracted from ERA-5 reanalysis models and downscaled to finer spatial resolution by using the Barnes objective analysis scheme. Rainfall series were derived from GPM-IMERG satellite product. Results indicate that the presented datasets allow a realistic analysis and mapping for the main water-related variables at both temporal and spatial scale. Consequently, these chronological series may be useful for several applications related to water, ecological, land and risk management.