ET-WB: water balance-based estimations of terrestrial evaporation over global land and major global basins

TL;DR

This study develops a global water balance-based ET dataset (ET-WB) using multi-source data, providing a comprehensive, uncertainty-aware estimate of terrestrial evaporation that aligns well with existing products and reveals climate-related trends.

Contribution

It introduces a novel water balance approach for global ET estimation, leveraging extensive multi-source datasets and probabilistic combinations to improve accuracy and uncertainty characterization.

Findings

Global ET-WB shows seasonal variability with peaks in July.

ET-WB estimates align with auxiliary datasets within +/-20% bias.

Long-term ET trends indicate increases in some regions due to warming.

Abstract

The prevailing approaches for ET retrievals are either limited in spatiotemporal coverage or largely influenced by choice of input data or simplified model physics, or a combination thereof. Here, using an independent mass conservation approach, we develop water balance-based ET datasets (ET-WB) for the global land and the selected 168 major river basins. We generate 4669 probabilistic unique combinations of the ET-WB leveraging multi-source datasets (23 precipitation, 29 runoff, and 7 storage change datasets) from satellite products, in-situ measurements, reanalysis, and hydrological simulations. We compare our results with the four auxiliary global ET datasets and previous regional studies, followed by a rigorous discussion of the uncertainties, their possible sources, and potential ways to constrain them. The seasonal cycle of global ET-WB possesses a unimodal distribution with the highest (median value: 65.61 mm/month) and lowest (median value: 36.11 mm/month) values in July and January, respectively, with the spread range of roughly +/-10 mm/month from different subsets of the ensemble. Auxiliary ET products illustrate similar intra-annual characteristics with some over/under-estimation, which are completely within the range of the ET-WB ensemble. We found a gradual increase in global ET-WB from 2003 to 2010 and a subsequent decrease during 2010-2015, followed by a sharper reduction in the remaining years primarily attributed to the varying precipitation. Multiple statistical metrics show reasonably good accuracy of monthly ET-WB (e.g., a relative bias of +/-20%) in most river basins, which ameliorates at annual scales. The long-term mean annual ET-WB varies within 500-600 mm/yr and is consistent with the for auxiliary ET products (543-569 mm/yr). Observed trend estimates, though regionally divergent, are evidence of the increasing ET in a warming climate.