Determinants of the ratio of actual to potential evapotranspiration

A widely used approach for estimating actual evapotranspiration (AET) in hydrological and earth system models is to constrain potential evapotranspiration (PET) with a single empirical stress factor (omega = AET/PET). omega represents the water availability and is fundamentally linked to canopy-atmosphere coupling. However, the mean and seasonal variability of omega in the models have rarely been evaluated against observations, and the model performances for different climates and biomes remain unclear. In this study, we first derived the observed omega from 28 FLUXNET sites over North America during 2000-2007, which was then used to evaluate omega in six large-scale model-based datasets. Our results confirm the importance of incorporating canopy height in the formulation of aerodynamic conductance in the case of forests. Furthermore, leaf area index (LAI) is central to the prediction of omega and can be quantitatively linked to the partitioning between transpiration and soil evaporation (R-2 = 0.43). The substantial differences between observed and model-based omega in forests (range: 0.2 similar to 0.9) are highly related to the way these models estimated PET and the way they represented the responses of omega to the environmental drivers, especially wind speed and LAI. This is the first assessment of omega in models based on in situ observations. Our findings demonstrate that the observed omega is useful for evaluating, validating, and optimizing the modeling of AET and thus of water and energy balances.