Full catalog/CD06_Camrex_1086
CD06_Camrex_1086·v1·dataset

Maps of which way Amazon rivers and land drain

LBA-ECO CD-06 Amazon River Basin Land and Stream Drainage Direction Maps
hydrosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 3 Shapefile
In plain English

What it measures. Detailed maps of how water drains across the Amazon River basin, showing stream networks, the direction land and rivers flow, tributary boundaries, and river mouths and sources, at roughly 500-m detail.

How it's made. Created with a topography-independent analysis method applied to an existing vector river network (the Digital Chart of the World), delivered as shapefiles and image files.

How & where you'd use it. Used to understand drainage and water flow across the Amazon basin, supporting hydrology and ecosystem studies of the region.

What's measured

TERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER PROCESSES/MEASUREMENTS › DRAINAGETERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › SURFACE WATER FEATURES › RIVERS/STREAMSTERRESTRIAL HYDROSPHERE › SURFACE WATER › WATERSHED CHARACTERISTICS

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span1940-01-01 → 1960-01-01
  • Measured byMAPS (DIGITIZER)
  • Processing levelLevel 3
  • Spatial extent-80.5, -20.5, -48.5, 6
  • FormatsShapefile
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
  • Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
  • Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage
Official description

This data set provides high-resolution (~500 m) gridded land and stream drainage direction maps for the Amazon River basin, excluding the Rio Tocantins basin. These maps are the result of a new topography-independent analysis method (Mayorga et al., 2005) using the vector river network from the Digital Chart of the World (DCW, Danko, 1992) to create a high-resolution flow direction map. The data products include (1) a stream network coverage with stream order assigned to each reach; (2) the basin boundaries of the major tributaries to the Amazon mainstem; (3) the mouths; and (4) the source points of these tributaries. There are 7 ESRI ArcGIS shapefiles provided in compressed *.zip format and 4 GeoTiff image files with this data set.

Get the data

cd06_camrex_1086_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="CD06_Camrex_1086",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.