Data sources

Waterfalls, names and heights

The list of waterfalls, their names in seven languages, the height and width of the drop, the published flow, the river, the protected area and World Heritage status come from Wikidata (CC0). Which waterfalls get a guide depends on how many Wikipedias write about them, their height and their water. When Wikidata has no height, the page uses the height mapped in OpenStreetMap and says so.

How much water, and when

The average flow and the flow of the lowest and highest month come from HydroATLAS (RiverATLAS v1.0, Linke et al. 2019, CC BY 4.0), whose discharge is modelled by WaterGAP for 1971–2000; we only use it when the modelled river passes within 300 m of the falls. The month-by-month calendar is our own estimate: rain plus snowmelt minus evaporation around the falls (NASA POWER), delayed by the size of the catchment. When Wikidata publishes a flow, that number wins.

Weather

Temperature, rain, wet days, sunshine and snow come from NASA POWER (MERRA-2 and CERES, averages 1991–2020 and month by month since 2020), for a cell about 55 km wide. Temperatures are carried to the height of the falls at −6.5 °C per 1,000 m. The data was obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science Division.

Relief, river profile and 3D model

The relief comes from the Copernicus DEM GLO-30, the 30 m elevation model of the whole Earth (TanDEM-X, 2011–2015): produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30. The river profile follows the river line of OpenStreetMap over this relief.

Around the falls

The exact point of each waterfall, the river line, viewpoints, paths, parking, swimming spots, picnic sites, toilets, information, bus stops, campsites and places to stay are counted in OpenStreetMap © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License. These figures appear only inside the pages, as text and drawings; they are never part of the data files of this site.

Images

The views from above and the skin of the 3D model are the Sentinel-2 cloudless 2016 mosaic by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), under CC BY 4.0. Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, only under free licences (public domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA), with the author and licence under each one.