Remote estimation of regional evapotranspiration

Three models are applied to estimating evapotranspiration in central Australia, using limited routine meteorological data and the NOAA-14 AVHRR overpass. By minimizing the difference between model predicted surface temperature and satellite derived temperature to adjust the estimated soil moisture, both an instantaneous physically based model and a one dimensional boundary layer simulation yielded consistent results. This highlights the sensitivity of surface temperature to soil moisture and suggests that radiometric surface temperature can be used to adjust simple water balance estimates of soil moisture providing a simple and effective means of estimating large scale evapotranspiration in remote and regions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.