Partitioning evapotranspiration over the continental United States using weather station data
Name
Rigden_et_al_2018_GRL.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
557.92 KB
Format
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Rigden, Angela J.
Salvucci, Guido D.
Entekhabi, Dara
Gianotti, Daniel J
Date Issued
August 2018
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Citation
Rigden, Angela J. et al., "Partitioning Evapotranspiration Over the Continental United States Using Weather Station Data." Geophysical Research Letters 45, 18 (September 2018): 9605-13 doi. 10.1029/2018GL079121 ©2018 Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Accurately characterizing evapotranspiration is critical when predicting the response of the hydrologic cycle to climate change. Although Earth system models estimate similar magnitudes of global evapotranspiration, the magnitude of each contributing source varies considerably between models due to the lack of evapotranspiration partitioning data. Here we develop an observation-based method to partition evapotranspiration into soil evaporation and transpiration using meteorological data and satellite soil moisture retrievals. We apply the methodology at 1,614 weather stations across the continental United States during the summers of 2015 and 2016. We evaluate the method using vegetation indices inferred from satellites, finding strong spatial correlations between modeled transpiration and solar-induced fluorescence (r2 = 0.87), and modeled vegetation fraction and leaf area index (r2 = 0.70). Since the sensitivity of evapotranspiration to environmental factors depends on the contribution of each source component, understanding the partitioning of evapotranspiration is increasingly important with climate change. ©2018. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL079121
