Elevation Cluster Dataset Covering the Yenisei River Basin

Yang, A. Q.^1*  Liu, C.²  Shi, R. X.²

1. Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China;

2. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Abstract: Elevation Cluster Dataset Covering the Yenisei River Basin (YeniseiRBasinEVC for short) is a raster data with 30m resolution on land elevation cluster in the Yenisei River Basin based on the data integration among the Aster-GDEM, Google Earth elevation data and the boundary data of the Yenisei River Basin. 10 classes of land elevation levels are identified from less than 50 meters above sea level to more than 3,000 meters. In the Yenisei River Basin, most of the area is mountain and the plateau. The area with the elevation lower than 200 m in north Yenisei River Basin belongs to West Siberian Plain and North Siberian Lowland. The middle and south parts belong to Central Siberian Plateau and Sayan Mountains. The data is archived in .tif format with the compressed data size of 115 MB.

Keywords: Yenisei river basin; elevation cluster dataset; Central Siberian Plateau; West Siberian Plain

1 Introduction

The Yenisei is the largest river system flowing to the Arctic Ocean^[1]. The Yenisei River contributes 630 km³ freshwater per year, which is about 22% of total freshwater flow into the Arctic Ocean^[2]. Fresh water discharge from northern-flowing rivers in the polar regions plays an important role in regulating the thermohaline circulation of the world’s oceans^[3]. The Yenisei River is also the boundary between the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau. The Elevation Cluster Dataset is one of the basic data for studying the Yenisei Basin. This dataset is produced based on the data integration among the Aster-GDEM and Google Earth elevation data. According to the terrain characteristic of Yenisei River Basin^[4–6], the cluster of the elevation was divided into ten intervals.

2 Metadata of dataset

The descriptions of the Elevation Cluster Dataset Covering the Yenisei River Basin are recorded. These information include the dataset full name, dataset short name, authors, geographical regions of the dataset content, year of the dataset, spatial resolution, data format and size, data files, data publisher, and the data sharing policy. Table 1 summarizes metadata elements of the dataset.

Table 1  Summary of the YeniseiRBasinEVC metadata

3 Materials and Methods

3.1 The Study Area

The Yenisei River Basin is mainly in Russia except a little south part belonging to Mongolia. In the Yenisei River Basin, most of the area is in the mountain and the plateau. The area with the elevation lower than 200 m in north Yenisei River Basin belongs to West Siberian Plain and North Siberian Lowland. The middle and south parts belong to Central Siberian Plateau and Sayan Mountains. The Yenisei River flows to Arctic Ocean from the south to north. The Yenisei River Basin (46°27ʹ28ʺN-73°38ʹ24ʺN, 73°37ʹ43ʺE-113°50ʹ53ʺE) cover the area with 2.66×10⁶ km². Figure 1 shows tiles of the YeniseiRBasinEVC.

3.2 Material and Preprocessing

The ASTER GDEM2 data was used as the main data source. Based on the boundary of Yenisei

River Basin^[7], a total of 534 GDEM2 data were selected, mosaicked and clipped.

ASTER GDEM2 was released on

October 17^th, 2011. Compared to the

first edition, the spatial resolution was improved, and the horizontal accuracy, vertical accuracy and water body elevation accuracy also improved. ASTER GDEM2 data cover land surface between south latitude 83° and north latitude 83°, with pixel resolution of 1 arc sec. The overall height accuracy of the ASTER GDEM2 is 17 m at the 95% confidence level and the horizontal position accuracy is about 75 m. Although GDEM2 has a lot of quality improvement compared to the first edition, the data have some anomalies in some areas with serious cloud interference. In order to correct these data anomalies, the Google Earth Digital Elevation Model is extracted to compensate for the outliers on GDEM2 data. Figure 2 and Figure 3 show the data anomalies (left) of ASTER GDEM2 and noisy free data (right).

Figure 2  The data anomalies and fixes

Figure 3  The data anomalies and fixes

3.3 Cluster of the Elevation

According to the topography characteristics of Yenisei River Basin, a total of 10 elevation

clusters were developed (Table 2). In order to reflect the distribution characteristics of

low-altitude areas, elevation less than 500 m was divided into four intervals. The elevation more than 3,000 m was divided as a single interval. The rest elevation from 500 m to 3,000 m was divided by an interval of 500 m. The Elevation Cluster Dataset Covering the Yenisei River Basin shows that the lowland area lower than 500 m is 1.65×10⁵ km², accounting 6.21% of the basin area; the area with elevation from 50 to 100 m is 9.93×10⁴ km² accoun-

ting 3.74% of the basin area; the land with elevation between 100 m and 200 m is 1.71×10⁵ km², about 6.43% of the total area of the basin. In Yenisei River Basin, the main part with area 9.75×10⁵ km² locates between 200 m and 500 m, which accounts about 36.66% of the basin；the land with elevation between 500 m and 1,000 m is 5.70×10⁵ km², 12.27% of total area of the basin. The mountain land more than 1,500 m above sea level accounts 13.26% of the basin area. The dataset was archived as .tif file with 112 MB compressed data size. The Elevation Cluster Dataset Covering the Yenisei River Basin is shown in Figure 4，and the statistics value is shown in Table 2.

4 Dataset Composition

The dataset consists of 2 files. They are:

(1). YeniseiRBasinEVC.rar, this is the elevation cluster data covering the Yen­isei River Basin, which was archived in .tif data format, with 115 MB compre­ssed data size. In this data, the codes and their elevations were shown in Table 2.

(2). Sta_YeniseiRBasinEVC.xlsx, this is the statistic file. Data size is 0.2 KB.

5 Discussion and Conclusion

The elevation cluster dataset is the basic data for learning the Yenisei River Basin. Based on the dataset, the overall charact­eristics of the basin could be grasped. The Elevation Cluster Dataset Covering the Yenisei River Basin indicates that most area of the Yenisei River Basin is located in mountainous and plateau areas. The northern plains of the Yenisei River (the western Siberian plain) and the lowlands (the northern Siberian lowlands) account for 9.95% of the basin area, the middle basin is the Central Siberian Plateau, and the Sayan and Tannu-Ola mountains locate at the south of the basin. The overall terrain presents a south-north low-lying situation, that is, low-latitude with high altitude, high altitude with low altitude. Yenisei River flows into the Kara Sea of Arctic Ocean from the Sayan Mountain and Tannu-Ola Mountain. It can be seen from the Elevation Cluster Dataset that the upper reaches of the Yenisei River are deep in the valley and the valley of the middle reaches change wide out of Sayan and Tannu-Ola mountains. The river catches water through the Central Siberian Plateau and flows to downstream. Downstream terrain is more flat, and a typical delta formed in the sea port.

Author Contributions

Yang A. Q. produced the dataset and wrote the manuscript. Liu, C. and Shi, R. X. contributed to the elevation classification, data quality inspection and manuscript review.

References

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