A review of freely accessible global datasets for the study of floods, droughts and their interactions with human societies

The availability of planetary‐scale geospatial datasets that can support the study of water‐related disasters in the Anthropocene is rapidly growing. This study reviews 124 global and free datasets allowing spatial (and temporal) analyses of floods, droughts and their interactions with human societies. The collection of datasets is available in a descriptive list for download at https://zenodo.org/record/3368882. The purpose of providing an overview of datasets across a wide range of hydrological and socioeconomic variables is to highlight research opportunities across scientific disciplines for the study of the water‐society interplay. The collection of datasets confirms that the availability of geospatial data capturing hydrological hazards and exposure is far more mature than those capturing vulnerability aspects. This paper doen't only highlight the unprecedented opportunities associated with these global datasets for the study of water‐related disasters in the Anthropocene, but also discuss the challenges associated with their exploitation. These challenges include: (a) time varying datasets advised not to be used in time series analyses; (b) fine spatial resolution datasets advised not to be used in local scale studies; (c), datasets built by a wide variety of data sources prohibiting systematic uncertainty assessments; and (d) datasets built by covariate variables preventing interaction studies.