Journal
WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH
Volume 56, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2019WR026594
Keywords
evapotranspiration; GRACE; water balance; model evaluation; remote sensing
Categories
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NASA
- NASA ECOSTRESS
- NASA SUSMAP
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Here, we evaluate basin-scale evapotranspiration (ET) estimates for eleven major river basins in the contiguous United States against a water balance approach with Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite observations. The relatively precise measurements of large-scale changes in water mass from GRACE are used to estimate the storage rate term in the terrestrial water budget and consequently provide an estimate, with propagated uncertainty, of basin-aggregated ET from mass conservation. We apply GRACE-based ET to two modeling systems (NLDAS-2 and GLDAS-2.1) comprised of five land surface models and three remote sensing-based products (MOD16, PT-JPL, and FLUXCOM) for 2003 to 2014. Both the land surface model-based and remote sensing-based ET are persistently lower than GRACE-based ET in all eleven basins tested. We also find that interannual variability is greater for GRACE-ET than the model and remote sensing products, and this is attributed to precipitation variability.
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