National Tibetan Plateau / Third Pole Environment Data Center (TPDC)
China's largest scientific data center for the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding Asian water towers, hosting 2,400+ datasets including gridded runoff, streamflow records for Third Pole cross-sections, evapotranspiration and cryosphere-hydrology model outputs for the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus headwaters. Online and offline download under a data sharing protocol.
data.tpdc.ac.cn
At a glance
- Region
- China (Asia)
- Coverage
- Tibetan Plateau / Pan-Third Pole
- Access
- Free
- Category
- Research Institute
- Last updated
- 2026
What's inside
- Hydrology
- Runoff
- Streamflow
- Cryosphere
- Evapotranspiration
What you can do with it
Typical work that data of this type supports.
- 01
Design flows
Estimate 1-in-50 and 1-in-100 year floods for bridges, culverts and spillways.
Because it has: Hydrology
- 02
Low flows
Set environmental flows and check what is left in the river in a dry year.
- 03
Irrigation scheduling
Decide when and how much to irrigate.
Because it has: Evapotranspiration
Where AI adds value
Ideas for machine learning and AI agents built on this kind of data.
- 01
Flow forecasting
Train LSTM-style models on past records to forecast river levels and flow days ahead.
- 02
Ungauged basins
Combine with catchment data to estimate flow where there is no gauge.
- 03
Field-scale ET
Estimate crop water use per field by combining satellite and weather with ML.
Related water data
- National Cryosphere Desert Data Center (NCDC) - Hydrology datasetsAsia | Free
- Science Data Bank (ScienceDB) - China hydrology datasetsAsia | Free
- National Earth System Science Data Center of China (Geodata.cn)Asia | Free
- NCHM Bhutan - National Center for Hydrology and MeteorologyAsia | Free
- TPDC - China Natural Runoff Dataset CNRD v1.0Asia | Free
- Beijing Climate CentreAsia | Free
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