Abstract. A complete global flood event record helps researchers analyse the distribution law of global floods and better formulate and manage disaster prevention and reduction policies. This study used GRACE terrestrial water storage and precipitation data combined with high-frequency filtering, anomaly detection and flood potential index methods to successfully extract historical flood days quasi-globally between Apr. 1st, 2002, and Aug. 31st, 2016, and further compared and validated the results with Dartmouth Flood Observatory (DFO) data, Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) discharge data, news reports and social media data. The results showed that the floods extracted in this study can cover 81 % of the flood events in the DFO database and supplement many additional flood events not recorded by the DFO. Moreover, the probability of detection exceeding 0.5 reached 62 % in level-4 river basins compared to flood events derived from the GRDC discharge data. These detection capabilities and detection results are both good. We finally provided flood day products with 1° spatial resolution covering the range of 60° S–60° N from Apr. 1st, 2002, to Aug. 31st, 2016. This research provides a data foundation for the mechanistic analysis and attribution of global flood events.