The Regional Research Network „Water in Central Asia“ (CAWa) funded by the German Federal Foreign Office consists of 19 remotely operated multi-parameter stations (ROMPS) in Central Asia. These stations were installed by the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, Germany in close cooperation with the Central-Asian Institute for Applied Geosciences (CAIAG) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the national hydrometeorological services in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the Ulugh Beg Astronomical Institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and the Kabul Polytechnic University, Afghanistan.

The primary objective of these stations is to support the establishment of a reliable data basis of meteorological and hydrological data especially in remote areas with extreme climate conditions in Central Asia for applications in climate and water monitoring. Up to now, ten years of data are provided for an area of scarce station distribution and with limited open access data which can be used for a wide range of scientific or engineering applications.

This dataset provides different types of raw hydrometeorological data such as air temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, wind speed and direction, precipitation, solar radiation, soil moisture and soil temperature as well as snow parameters and river discharge information for selected sites. The data has not undergone any quality control mechanism and should, therefore, be seen as raw data. A visual inspection of the data set has been made and some errors and quality degradation are listed in Zech et al. (2020) but does not claim to be complete. A quality control is strongly recommended by the authors before using the data.

Each station data has its own storage directory at the data dissemination server named with the abbreviation (4-letter code) of the station. The data is sampled with a 5-minute interval and stored in hourly files separated by the type of data. These files are then archived as monthly files named with the station abbreviation, type of data, year and month. After one year, these monthly files are further archived to a yearly file. A detailed description for the stations is provided by the Station Exposure Descriptions. Further information about the dataset can be found in Zech et al. (2020). All data is compiled as ASCII data in two different formats which are explained in the documents GITW-SSP-FMT-GFZ-003.pdf (for the stations ALAI, ALA6, and SARY) and CAWA-SSP-FMT-GFZ-006.pdf (for all other stations).

Monthly, the data will be dynamically extended as long as data can be acquired from the stations. Additionally, the near real-time data can be displayed and downloaded without any registration from the Sensor Data Storage System (SDSS) hosted at the Central-Asian Institute for Applied Geosciences (CAIAG) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.