The National River Flow Archive provides systematic storage for river flow data; the normal minimum requirement for inclusion in the national archive is several successive years of flow data. However, much valuable hydrological information is aperiodic, sporadic or event-specific in nature, and thus less amenable to storage in conventional archives designed to hold time series data; this is particularly true of data and information relating to the pre-instrumentation period. The NRFA operates a programme of capturing and storing long hydrometric records as part of the national archive, with the aim of capitalising on the significant volume of historical hydrometric time series data for the UK and placing this valuable historical river flow data more readily in the public domain.
