Abstract
Accurate estimation of evapotranspiration is generally constrained due to lack of required hydrometeorological datasets. This study addresses the performance analysis of reference evapotranspiration (ETo) estimated from NASA/POWER, National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) global reanalysis data before and after dynamical downscaling through the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The state-of-the-art Hamon’s and Penman-Monteith’s methods were utilized for the ETo estimation in the Northern India. The performance indices such as bias, root mean square error (RMSE), and correlation (r) were calculated, which showed the values 0.242, 0.422, and 0.959 for NCEP data (without downscaling) and 0.230, 0.402, and 0.969 for the downscaled data respectively. The results indicated that after WRF downscaling, there was some marginal improvement found in the ETo as compared to the without downscaling datasets. However, a better performance was found in the case of NASA/POWER datasets with bias, RMSE, and correlation values of 0.154, 0.348, and 0.960 respectively. In overall, the results indicated that the NASA/POWER and WRF downscaled data can be used for ETo estimation, especially in the ungauged areas. However, NASA/POWER is recommended as the ETo calculations are less computationally expensive and easily available than performing WRF simulations.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the SERB-DST for funding this research and DST-Mahamana Centre for Excellence in Climate Change Research, Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development, Banaras Hindu University, for providing necessary support for this research. The authors would like to thank the National Centers for Environmental Prediction for providing the NCEP data and NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) POWER Project for providing NASA-POWER datasets. The authors are also thankful to the Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, for providing ground-based observational datasets.
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Srivastava, P.K., Singh, P., Mall, R.K. et al. Performance assessment of evapotranspiration estimated from different data sources over agricultural landscape in Northern India. Theor Appl Climatol 140, 145–156 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-019-03076-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-019-03076-4