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Daily Reference Evapotranspiration for Hyper-Arid to Moist Sub-Humid Climates in Inner Mongolia, China: I. Assessing Temperature Methods and Spatial Variability

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Abstract

When weather data sets available for computing the reference evapotranspiration are incomplete or of questionable quality, there is the need to replace the FAO Penman-Monteith (PM-ETo) method by approaches requiring reduced sets only, particularly maximum and minimum temperature. The Hargreaves-Samani (HS) equation and the PM-ETo using only temperature data (PMT) are considered in this study and their results are compared with those of the PM-ETo using full datasets. Daily data sets refer to the period 1981–2012 and to a network of 50 meteorological stations covering the wide range of climates of Inner Mongolia. For both the PMT and HS methods, the solar radiation coefficients kRs were calibrated and have shown to be similar for both methods and to vary with climate aridity. For the PMT, the estimation of the dew point temperature (Tdew) was performed using the minimum temperature corrected for site aridity or, for humid climates, from a value near the average temperature. This improved estimation of Tdew was essential for a good performance of the PMT method in arid conditions and when temperatures are extremely low. RMSE <1 mm day−1 was obtained for both HS and PMT methods, and the modeling efficiency generally exceeded 0.85. The worse results correspond to windy and arid locations. The principal components analysis (PCA) in R-Mode have shown that the spatial variability of ETo computed with PM-ETo or with the HS and PMT methods were coherent. PCA supported the interpretation of ETo results. Overall, PMT performed better than HS for most locations.

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Acknowledgments

This study is supported by the Ministry of Education Innovation Team Development Plan (No: IRT13069), and the Project of National Natural Science Fund (NO: 51069006). The authors thank the Chinese Meteorological Data Sharing Service Network for providing the meteorological data used in this study. This study was partially supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology through the project PTDC/GEO-MET/3476/2012. The third author acknowledges the PhD research grant SFRH/BD/92880/2013 and the Post-Doc research grant (SFRH/BPD/102478/2014) awarded to the fourth author is also acknowledged.

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  1. Institute of Water Conservancy and Civil Engineering, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, 010018, China

    Xiaodong Ren & Zhongyi Qu

  2. LEAF, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade de Lisboa, Tapada da Ajuda, 1349-017, Lisboa, Portugal

    Diogo S. Martins, Paula Paredes & Luis S. Pereira

  3. Instituto Dom Luiz, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal

    Diogo S. Martins

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  1. Xiaodong Ren
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Correspondence to Zhongyi Qu or Luis S. Pereira.

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Ren, X., Qu, Z., Martins, D.S. et al. Daily Reference Evapotranspiration for Hyper-Arid to Moist Sub-Humid Climates in Inner Mongolia, China: I. Assessing Temperature Methods and Spatial Variability. Water Resour Manage 30, 3769–3791 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-016-1384-9

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