Evaluating the hydrological consistency of evaporation products using satellite-based gravity and rainfall data

López, Oliver; Houborg, Rasmus; McCabe, Matthew Francis

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-323-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-323-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Observations and modeling of land surface water and energy...

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-323-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 1

Research article

|

18 Jan 2017

Research article |

| 18 Jan 2017

Evaluating the hydrological consistency of evaporation products using satellite-based gravity and rainfall data

Oliver López, Rasmus Houborg, and Matthew Francis McCabe

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-323-2017-supplement

Data sets

Improvements to a MODIS global terrestrial evapotranspiration algorithm (http://files.ntsg.umt.edu/data/NTSG_Products/MOD16/) Q. Mu, M. Zhao, and S. W. Running https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2011.02.019

The gravity recovery and climate experiment: Mission overview and early results (ftp://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/allData/grace/L2/CSR/RL05/) B. D. Tapley, S. Bettadpur, M. Watkins, and C. Reigber https://doi.org/10.1029/2004GL019920

Global precipitation at one-degree daily resolution from multisatellite observations (ftp://meso.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/1dd-v1.2/) G. J. Huffman, R. F. Adler, M. M. Morrissey, D. T. Bolvin, S. Curtis, R. Joyce, B. McGavock, and J. Susskind https://doi.org/10.1175/1525-7541(2001)002\textless0036:GPAODD\textgreater2.0.CO;2

Program to calculate the spectral harmonic expansion coefficients of the two scalar fields product (http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/ABHK_v1_0.html) Z. Martinec https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-4655(89)90043-X

An approach for spherical harmonic analysis of non-smooth data (http://www.iamg.org/documents/oldftp/VOL32/v32-10-11.zip) H. Wang, P. Wu, and Z. Wang https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2006.03.004

Short summary

The study evaluated the spatial and temporal consistency of satellite-based hydrological products based on the water budget equation, including three global evaporation products. The products were spatially matched using spherical harmonics analysis. The results highlighted the difficulty in obtaining agreement between independent satellite products, even over regions with simple water budgets. However, imposing a time lag on water storage data improved results considerably.