Insights into the aerodynamic versus radiometric surface temperature debate in thermal-based evaporation modeling

Authors

Kaniska Mallick
Dennis Baldocchi
Andrew Jarvis
Tian Hu
Ivonne Trebs
Mauro Sulis
Nishan Bhattarai
Christian Bossung
Yomna Eid
Jamie Cleverly
Jason Beringer
William Woodgate
Richard Silberstein, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Nina Hinko-Najera
Wayne S. Meyer
Darren Ghent
Zoltan Szantoi
Gilles Boulet
William P. Kustas

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Geophysical Research Letters

Volume

49

Issue

15

Publisher

Wiley

School

School of Science

RAS ID

52074

Funders

Australian Research Council / FNR. Grant Numbers: INTER/PRIMA/19/13566440/SMARTIES, C19/SR/13652816 / National Collaborative Infrastructure Strategy / Mobility Fellowship from the FNR Luxembourg / NASA / US Department of Energy

Grant Number

ARC Number : DE190101182

Grant Link

http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DE190101182

Comments

Mallick, K., Baldocchi, D., Jarvis, A., Hu, T., Trebs, I., Sulis, M., ... & Kustas, W. P. (2022). Insights into the aerodynamic versus radiometric surface temperature debate in thermal-based evaporation modeling. Geophysical Research Letters, 49(15), e2021GL097568. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL097568

Abstract

Global evaporation monitoring from Earth observation thermal infrared satellite missions is historically challenged due to the unavailability of any direct measurements of aerodynamic temperature. State-of-the-art one-source evaporation models use remotely sensed radiometric surface temperature as a substitute for the aerodynamic temperature and apply empirical corrections to accommodate for their inequality. This introduces substantial uncertainty in operational drought mapping over complex landscapes. By employing a non-parametric model, we show that evaporation can be directly retrieved from thermal satellite data without the need of any empirical correction. Independent evaluation of evaporation in a broad spectrum of biome and aridity yielded statistically significant results when compared with eddy covariance observations. While our simplified model provides a new perspective to advance spatio-temporal evaporation mapping from any thermal remote sensing mission, the direct retrieval of aerodynamic temperature also generates the highly required insight on the critical role of biophysical interactions in global evaporation research.

DOI

10.1029/2021GL097568

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License