Abstract
Evapotranspiration (ET), which relates to hydrology and the energy cycle process of land surface, is a key link of the water cycle and an important item of expenditure in energy balance. There have been multiple state-of-the-art climate models that were included in Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), but the performance in estimating the ET of the models is still unclear. Thus, this study evaluated the global terrestrial ET of CMIP6 models. The performance of the models and CMIP6 ensemble mean was compared with the GLEAM v3.3a dataset, and the uncertainties of the ensemble were evaluated using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The results show that there was no perfect model that could perform optimally in all aspects of the comparison, and the performance of the CMIP6 ensemble was better than that of a single model. MIROC6, CESM2, and EC-Earth3 performed satisfactorily in some aspects, whereas the performance was poor in other aspects. GFDL-ESM4 exhibited a relatively poor performance. Most models and the CMIP6 ensemble overestimated ET, and the estimations of different models varied greatly, but the results of most models showed an increasing trend. The CMIP6 ensemble overestimated ET in most regions of the world and may have smoothened the variation in the model estimations. In high latitudes such as northern parts of North America and Eurasia, results of the CMIP6 ensemble and GLEAM were approximately the same. The uncertainty of the CMIP6 ensemble was generally low and the estimation reliability varied according to the geographical region.
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Data availability
The GLEAM dataset can be found at a server and obtained through an SFTP. The passwords to it can be obtained from https://www.gleam.eu (Martens, Miralles, Lievens, van der Schalie, de Jeu, Fernández-Prieto, Beck, Dorigo, Verhoest and Verhoest, 2017; Miralles et al. 2011b).
The CMIP6 datasets can be found at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/, an open-source online data repository hosted by ESGF(Eyring et al. 2016).
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Acknowledgments
The datasets used in this study were downloaded from different data repositories. The Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model’s (GLEAM) evapotranspiration data are from the GLEAM v3.3 database. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Program, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6. We thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access, and the multiple funding agencies who support CMIP6 and ESGF. We would like to thank Editage (www.editage.cn) for English language editing. We sincerely appreciate the anonymous reviewers’ helpful comments and the editor’s efforts in improving this manuscript.
Funding
This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China [grant number 2017YFA0603702]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41701023].
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Wang Zhizhen: investigation, methodology, formal analysis, data curation, writing-original draft, Visualization.
Zhan Chesheng: conceptualization, writing-review and editing, supervision, project administration, funding acquisition.
Ning Like: conceptualization, methodology, validation, investigation, resources, writing-review, and editing.
Guo Hai: visualization.
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Wang, Z., Zhan, C., Ning, L. et al. Evaluation of global terrestrial evapotranspiration in CMIP6 models. Theor Appl Climatol 143, 521–531 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03437-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03437-4