Scotland Hydrology Dataset

Methodology

Ingested from SEPA’s Kisters KiWIS time series service under the Open Government Licence. Rainfall totals and groundwater levels are taken as SEPA publishes them, monthly. Flow is published only daily, so Hydrionis computes the monthly mean and refuses any month with fewer than twenty days of record rather than averaging a partial month. Stations need ten years of record. Groundwater is water table elevation above Ordnance Datum, not depth below ground.

What this dataset cannot tell you

Coverage

Subjects	Scottish SEPA flow, rainfall and groundwater stations with 10+ years of record — 712 held
Period	1929–2026
Units	m, mm, m³/s
Update cadence	Monthly
Identifier	`scotland-hydrology` v1.0.0

Fields

Data dictionary →

Every metric this dataset carries, with the unit it is stored in and the geography level it is reported at. Full definitions are in the data dictionary.

Identifier	Field	Unit	Reported at
`river-flow-monthly-mean`	Mean monthly river flow Average volumetric discharge past a gauging station over a calendar month.	m³/s	river-gauge
`precipitation-monthly`	Monthly precipitation Total depth of precipitation falling over a defined area within a calendar month.	mm	monitoring-station, grid-cell
`groundwater-level`	Groundwater level Elevation of the water table or piezometric surface at a monitoring borehole.	m	borehole

Rights and access

Licence position

Open with attribution. Derivative use true; redistribution true; commercial reuse true.

Attribution required:

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Permitted uses

Public display
Derived analysis
API delivery
Bulk download
Commercial use

Available to: Public, Developer, Research, Professional, Enterprise. These follow from the rights of the contributing publishers, not from a Hydrionis pricing decision — no access tier can widen what a publisher withheld.

Contributing sources

Scottish Environment Protection Agency — SEPA water environment data (Open Government Licence v3.0)

Suggested citation

Hydrionis (2026), Scotland Hydrology Dataset, version 1.0.0. Retrieved from https://hydrionis.com/data/datasets/scotland-hydrology/

Cite the version. Hydrionis datasets change as publishers release and as methods are revised, and a citation without a version cannot be checked later.

Changelog

Version 1.0.0 — 2026-08-25

First release. Scotland moves from a generic country profile to a monitored network.

Additions

Scottish river flow, rainfall and groundwater series.

Getting the data

Machine-readable metadata for this dataset is at /api/v1/datasets/scotland-hydrology.json. For bulk extracts, higher-volume access or commercial licensing, see data enquiries.