Abstract
Characterizing the terrestrial carbon, water and energy cycles depends strongly on a capacity to accurately reproduce the spatial and temporal dynamics of land surface evaporation. For this, and many other reasons, monitoring terrestrial evaporation across multiple space and time scales has been an area of focused research for many decades. Much of this activity has been supported by developments in satellite remote sensing, which have been leveraged to deliver new process insights, model development and methodological improvements. In this Special Issue, published contributions explored a range of research topics directed towards the enhanced estimation of terrestrial evaporation. Here we summarize these cutting-edge efforts and provide an overview of some of the state-of-the-art approaches for retrieving this key variable. Some perspectives on outstanding challenges, issues, and opportunities are also presented.
Highlights
The exchange of water between the surface and the atmosphere plays a critical role in the complex dynamics driving the Earth’s carbon, water, and energy cycles
The results indicate that while the uncertainty in local partitioning dominates the inter-model spread in modeled soil evaporation, the inter-model differences in transpiration are dominated by the uncertainty in the distribution of ET over the Eastern U.S and the local partitioning uncertainty in the Western U.S
The monitoring and measurement of terrestrial evaporation remains a topic of considerable relevance to multi-disciplinary studies in hydrology, meteorology, and ecology, as well as the agricultural and plant sciences
Summary
The exchange of water between the surface and the atmosphere plays a critical role in the complex dynamics driving the Earth’s carbon, water, and energy cycles. While the various methodological approaches for flux estimation are relatively well developed [11,12,13], recent advances in Earth observation technologies [14], coupled with the exploitation of new retrieval and sensing techniques [13,15], provide an opportunity for further insights into the evaporative process. Fisher et al [13] provided a motivational call to the community to address some of the science and application questions related to evaporation estimation These included improvements in the accuracy of retrievals, spatio-temporal resolution, multi-scale coverage, and long-term monitoring, amongst many others. In light of such outstanding modeling and observational “challenges”, this Special Issue sought to explore some of the technological and methodological advances that take the first steps towards developing new paradigms in evaporation estimation. The following sections provide an overview of the twelve manuscripts that comprise this Special Issue, together with some concluding thoughts and perspectives
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