The divergence between potential and actual evapotranspiration: An insight from climate, water, and vegetation change

Recently, unprecedented extreme drought has appeared around the world. As the most direct signal of drought, evapotranspiration deserves a more systematic and comprehensive study. Further depicting their divergence of potential (ETp) and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) will help to explore the limitation of evapotranspiration. In this paper, the multi-source remote sensing datasets from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and its follow-on experiment (GRACE-FO), the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) during 2002 to 2020 were employed to explore the influence of meteorological, hydrological and botanical factors on ETp, ETa and their divergence - reduction of evapotranspiration (E-r) which represents regional vegetation and water limitations. According to the Pearson correlation analysis and the Boruta Algorithm based on Random Forest, the temperature is the first decisive promoter of evapotranspiration in the most area while the sparse vegetation is the primary or second determinant limiting the evapotranspiration in 61.84% of the world. In addition, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) data from 2030 to 2090 and the support vector machine regression (SVMR) model were applied to predict the future global ETp, ETa and E-r on the pixel scale. Predicted results of the model considering the water change not only can highly improve the model performance (with higher R-2), but also can simulate the drought in Europe and the more intense ETa in Africa. Thus, Er proposed in this study provide a good reference for regional ETa except for ETp. The future evapotranspiration value derived by introducing the water storage changes into the machine learning model in this study is also valuable for climate change adaptation and drought warning. (C) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This study utilized remote sensing data to investigate the relationships among global extreme drought, evapotranspiration, and meteorological, hydrological, and botanical factors. Future global evapotranspiration was predicted and a method for deriving future evapotranspiration values was provided, showing significant value for climate change adaptation and drought warning.