Retraction Note: A 10 per cent increase in global land evapotranspiration from 2003 to 2019 (Nature, (2021), 593, 7860, (543-547), 10.1038/s41586-021-03503-5)

Abstract

In this article, we calculated global land evapotranspiration for 2003 to 2019 using a mass-balance approach. To do this, we calculated evapotranspiration as the residual of the water balance, using an ensemble of datasets for precipitation, discharge and total water storage change. We made an error in calculating the global mean precipitation: we used arithmetic averaging to calculate the mean, instead of calculating a spatially weighted mean to account for the changing grid box size with latitude. As a result, the magnitudes of the global mean precipitation time series were underestimated. This impacted the subsequent calculation of global mean evapotranspiration, resulting in the mean evapotranspiration values being underestimated and altering some results. We are therefore retracting this article. We thank Ning Ma and others for bringing this error to our attention.