Precipitation (P) and evapotranspiration (ET) are the key factors determining water availability for water resource management activities in river basins. While global P and ET data products have become more accessible, their performances in river basins with a diverse climate and landscape remain less discussed. This paper evaluated the performance of four representative global P (CHIRPSP, GLDASP, TRMMP and PersiannP) and ET products (CSIROET, GLDASET, MODET and TerraClimateET) against the reference data provided by the AustralianWater Availability Project (AWAP) in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) of Australia. The disparities among the data products both in the period from 2001 to 2016 and across the 22 catchments of MDB were related to a set of catchment characteristics (climate, terrain, etc.) to explore any possible contributors. The results show that the four global P products presented overall high consistency with AWAPP across the MDB catchments except in southeastern catchments with abundant rainfalls and large terrain variations. The Penman-Monteith algorithm based MODET underestimated ET in the MDB, especially in the arid, less vegetation covered catchments. While the CSIROET, which also estimated with the Penman-Monteith method, presented overall better estimations, which can be attributed to the better parameterization of the landscape in the simulation processes. The hydrological model based TerraClimateET showed overall good consistency with AWAPET except in the arid catchments, which might be attributed to the simplified water balance model it applied, however it did not adequately reflect the intensive ground water uses in these catchments. The findings indicated that basin and catchment characteristics had impacts on the accuracy of global products and therefore provided important implications for choosing appropriate product and/or conducting field calibrations for potential users in large basins characterized with diverse rainfall, terrain variations and land use patterns.
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CITATION STYLE
Zhao, Y., Lu, Z., & Wei, Y. (2019). An assessment of global precipitation and evapotranspiration products for regional applications. Remote Sensing, 11(9). https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11091077