historical gridded reconstruction of potential evapotranspiration for the uk

Clicks: 168
ID: 226015
2018
Free PDF
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Steady

Ranked #33 of 42 articles by views in usak university journal of engineering sciences

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Sign in to mint
Abstract
Potential evapotranspiration (PET) is a necessary input data for most hydrological models and is often needed at a daily time step. An accurate estimation of PET requires many input climate variables which are, in most cases, not available prior to the 1960s for the UK, nor indeed most parts of the world. Therefore, when applying hydrological models to earlier periods, modellers have to rely on PET estimations derived from simplified methods. Given that only monthly observed temperature data is readily available for the late 19th and early 20th century at a national scale for the UK, the objective of this work was to derive the best possible UK-wide gridded PET dataset from the limited data available.

To that end, firstly, a combination of (i) seven temperature-based PET equations, (ii) four different calibration approaches and (iii) seven input temperature data were evaluated. For this evaluation, a gridded daily PET product based on the physically based Penman–Monteith equation (the CHESS PET dataset) was used, the rationale being that this provides a reliable ground truth PET dataset for evaluation purposes, given that no directly observed, distributed PET datasets exist. The performance of the models was also compared to a naïve method, which is defined as the simplest possible estimation of PET in the absence of any available climate data. The naïve method used in this study is the CHESS PET daily long-term average (the period from 1961 to 1990 was chosen), or CHESS-PET daily climatology.

The analysis revealed that the type of calibration and the input temperature dataset had only a minor effect on the accuracy of the PET estimations at catchment scale. From the seven equations tested, only the calibrated version of the McGuinness–Bordne equation was able to outperform the naïve method and was therefore used to derive the gridded, reconstructed dataset. The equation was calibrated using 43 catchments across Great Britain.

The dataset produced is a 5 km gridded PET dataset for the period 1891 to 2015, using the Met Office 5 km monthly gridded temperature data available for that time period as input data for the PET equation. The dataset includes daily and monthly PET grids and is complemented with a suite of mapped performance metrics to help users assess the quality of the data spatially.

This dataset is expected to be particularly valuable as input to hydrological models for any catchment in the UK.

The data can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.5285/17b9c4f7-1c30-4b6f-b2fe-f7780159939c.

Reference Key
tanguy2018earthhistorical Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors M. Tanguy, C. Prudhomme, K. Smith, J. Hannaford
Are you one of these authors? Claim your profile
Journal usak university journal of engineering sciences
Year 2018
DOI
10.5194/essd-10-951-2018
URL
https://www.earth-syst-sci-data.net/10/951/2018/essd-10-951-2018.pdf
Keywords
environmental sciencesgeology

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.