Spatial and Decadal Variations in Potential Evapotranspiration of China Based on Reanalysis Datasets during 1982–2010

Atmosphere

Yunjun Yao²  Shaohua Zhao³  Yuhu Zhang¹  Kun Jia²  Meng Liu² 

[1] College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, No.105 North Road, Beijing 100048, China; E-Mail:;State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, No.19 Xinjiekou Street, Beijing 100875, China; E-Mails:;Ministry of Environmental Protection, Environmental Satellite Center, East Road of Yongfeng Base, Beijing 100094, China

关键词: potential evapotranspiration;    pan evaporation;    incident solar radiation;    vapor pressure deficit;    wind speed;    China;   

DOI  :  10.3390/atmos5040737

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Potential evapotranspiration (PET) is an important indicator of atmospheric evaporation demand and has been widely used to characterize hydrological change. However, sparse observations of pan evaporation (EP) prohibit the accurate characterization of the spatial and temporal patterns of PET over large spatial scales. In this study, we have estimated PET of China using the Penman-Monteith (PM) method driven by gridded reanalysis datasets to analyze the spatial and decadal variations of PET in China during 1982–2010. The results show that the estimated PET has decreased on average by 3.3 mm per year (p < 0.05) over China during 1982–1993, while PET began to increase since 1994 by 3.4 mm per year (p < 0.05). The spatial pattern of the linear trend in PET of China illustrates that a widely significant increasing trend in PET appears during 1982–2010 in Northwest China, Central China, Northeast China and South China while there are no obvious variations of PET in other regions. Our findings illustrate that incident solar radiation (Rs) is the largest contributor to the variation of PET in China, followed by vapor pressure deficit (VPD), air temperature (Tair) and wind speed (WS). However, WS is the primary factor controlling inter-annual variation of PET over Northwest China.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.