CANOPEX: A Canadian hydrometeorological watershed database

Over the past few years, many international initiatives and collaborations were launched to improve and share knowledge in hydrology research. Large databases allowed finding patterns and relationships across regions and scales. This paper introduces the Canadian model parameter experiment (CANOPEX) database, which is adapted from the US MOPEX project data and methods. The CANOPEX database includes meteorological and hydrometric data as well as watershed boundaries for 698 basins. Two sets of basin‐averaged meteorological data (Maximum and minimum temperature and precipitation) are provided. The first dataset is directly taken from Environment Canada's weather stations whereas the second is extracted from the Natural Resources Canada gridded climate data product. Data are provided in MOPEX and Matlab formats. CANOPEX watersheds are well distributed over Canada, which allows investigating a variety of physiological and climatological conditions. The CANOPEX database can be used in a variety of hydrologic research projects such as climate change impact studies, model comparisons, multi‐modelling, ensemble streamflow prediction and model parameter estimation. CANOPEX could be used to generalize findings to other cold climate catchments as well as assess the robustness of research methodologies and procedures. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.