We collected streamflow observations and global and local forcing data for model simulations and information about geology and topography to show catchment properties (Table 1). We used the time period 1980–1995 for model simulations since it has the highest data availability, which results in 50 and 41 stations for precipitation and temperature, respectively. We chose the Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP V2) data set (Beck et al. 2019) as the global precipitation data. It has a high spatial resolution of 0.1°. Compared with other global precipitation data sets, it can represent spatial patterns in a more realistic way and is, therefore, able to provide more accurate precipitation amounts and frequencies also in mountainous areas (Beck et al. 2019; Xu et al. 2019). The earlier version has been applied in many study contexts like the simulation of soil moisture and evaporation (Martens et al. 2017) and lake dynamics (Satgé et al. 2017). By aggregation, we derived global precipitation in the spatial resolution of 0.2°.