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GRACE‐based Mass Conservation as a Validation Target for Basin‐Scale Evapotranspiration in the Contiguous United States
Author(s) -
PascoliniCampbell Madeleine A.,
Reager John T.,
Fisher Joshua B.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1029/2019wr026594
Subject(s) - evapotranspiration , environmental science , structural basin , precipitation , scale (ratio) , satellite , drainage basin , water balance , climatology , hydrological modelling , data assimilation , hydrology (agriculture) , meteorology , remote sensing , geography , geology , engineering , cartography , ecology , paleontology , geotechnical engineering , aerospace engineering , biology
Here, we evaluate basin‐scale evapotranspiration (ET) estimates for eleven major river basins in the contiguous United States against a water balance approach with Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite observations. The relatively precise measurements of large‐scale changes in water mass from GRACE are used to estimate the storage rate term in the terrestrial water budget and consequently provide an estimate, with propagated uncertainty, of basin‐aggregated ET from mass conservation. We apply GRACE‐based ET to two modeling systems (NLDAS‐2 and GLDAS‐2.1) comprised of five land surface models and three remote sensing‐based products (MOD16, PT‐JPL, and FLUXCOM) for 2003 to 2014. Both the land surface model‐based and remote sensing‐based ET are persistently lower than GRACE‐based ET in all eleven basins tested. We also find that interannual variability is greater for GRACE‐ET than the model and remote sensing products, and this is attributed to precipitation variability.