Global high-resolution reference potential evaporation

Abstract

The increasing pressure on water resources worldwide request for both global and local scale assessments of fresh water availability. Gridded global reference potential evaporation (PET) datasets derived from either satellite or re-analysis data already exist, yet their time-coverage is often limited. Moreover the spatial and/or temporal resolution does not match the local scale requirements or the ever increasing resolutions of global hydrological models. We here introduce a high-resolution gridded reference potential evaporation dataset covering a period of 34 years that can be used in data sparse regions and for global scale analysis.