Abstract
The Pan-Eurasian and African Continents are characterized by large ranges of climates varying from humid, semi-humid, semi-arid and arid regions, and great challenges exist in water allocation for different sectors that related to water resource and food security, which depends strongly on the water use information. Quantitative information on water use is also important to understand the effectiveness of water allocation and further to prevent from water stress resulted by drought in water-scarce regions. Explosive development of satellite remote sensing observations provide great chance to provide useful spatiotemporal information for quantifying the water use at regional to global scales. In this paper, a process-based model ETMonitor was used in combination with biophysical and hydrological parameters retrieved from earth observations to estimate the actual evapotranspiration, i.e. the agricultural and ecological water use. The total water use is also partitioned into beneficial part, e.g. plant transpiration, and non-beneficial part, e.g. soil evaporation and canopy rainfall interception, according to the water accounting framework. The estimated water use show good agreements with the ground observation, indicating the ability of ETMonitor for global and continental scale water use estimation. The spatial and temporal patterns of the water use in the Pan-Eurasian and African Continents were further analysed, while large spatial variation of water use was convinced. Current study also highlights the great capability of satellite observations in studying the regional water resource and continental water cycle.
Highlights
Water is an important resource required for the daily sustenance and survival of human beings, and it is crucial to facilitate livelihoods and economic growth
The Pan-Eurasian and African Continents are characterized by large ranges of climates varying from humid, semi-humid, semi-arid and arid regions, and great challenges exist in water allocation for different sectors that related to water resource and food security, which depends strongly on the water use information
The water use estimated by ETMonitor differ from observation mostly occurs in Guantao site, its bias is still less than 1 mm d-1 and root mean square error (RMSE) is less than 1.5 mm d-1, which is acceptable in current large scale water flux estimation model
Summary
Water is an important resource required for the daily sustenance and survival of human beings, and it is crucial to facilitate livelihoods and economic growth. As a result of climate change and population development pressures, water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource worldwide [1]. Coping with water scarcity and growing competition for water among different sectors requires proper water management strategies and decision processes. A prerequisite is crucial to understand the basin hydrological processes, manageable and unmanageable water flows, the interaction with land use and opportunities to mitigate the negative effects and increase the benefits of water depletion on society [2,3,4]. At global and continental scales, precipitation is the largest components of the terrestrial water budget which presents the water availability, while evapotranspiration (ET) is the second largest component presenting the water use [5].
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