Gridded European Evapotranspiration Climatologies

Spatial patterns in long-term evapotranspiration (ET) represent a unique source of information for evaluating the spatial pattern performance of distributed hydrological models at river basin to continental scale. This kind of model evaluation is getting increased attention, acknowledging the shortcomings of traditional aggregated or timeseries based evaluations. A variety of satellite remote sensing (RS) based ET estimates exists covering a range of methods and resolutions. There is therefore a need to evaluate these estimates, not only in terms of temporal performance and similarity, but also in terms of long-term spatial patterns. The current study evaluates four RS-ET(MODIS16, TSEB, PML_V2 and PT-JPL) estimates at moderate resolution with respect to spatial patterns in comparison to two alternative continental scale gridded ET estimates (Water balance -ET and Budyko). To increase comparability, an empirical correction factor between clear sky and all-weather ET, based on eddy covariance data is derived, which could be suitable for simple corrections of clear sky estimates. The datasets contains the four RS-ET (MODIS16, TSEB, PML_V2 and PT-JPL) datasets at 1 km and 25 km spatial resolution and two alternative ET datasets (Water balance -ET and Budyko) at 25 km spatial resolution (ETRS_1989_LAEA; EPSG:3035). All data present long-term average annual ET for the period of 2002 to 2014, with units in mm/year.