Spatial–temporal changes in potential evaporation patterns based on the Cloud model and their possible causes

Abstract

It is of importance to comprehensively investigate the spatial–temporal changes in potential evaporation patterns, which helps guide the long-term water resource allocation and irrigation managements. In this study, the Cloud model was adopted to quantify the average, uniformity, and stability of the annual potential evaporation in the Wei River Basin (WRB), a typical arid and semi-arid region in China, with the purpose of objectively and comprehensively characterizing its changing patterns. The cross wavelet analysis was then applied to explore the correlations between annual potential evaporation and Arctic Oscillation (AO)/El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) with an aim to determine the possible causes of annual potential evaporation variations. Results indicated that: (1) the average of annual potential evaporation in the WRB first declined and then increased, and its stability also showed the same change characteristics, whilst its dispersion degree exhibited a decreasing trend, implying that potential evaporation has a smaller inter-annual variation; (2) the average of annual potential evaporation in the western basin was obviously smaller than that in the other areas, while its uniformity and stability in the Guanzhong plain and the Loess Plateau areas are larger than those in other areas, especially in the western basin where the uniformity and stability are the smallest; (3) both AO and ENSO exhibited strong correlations with annual potential evaporation variations, indicating that both AO and ENSO have played an important role in the annual potential evaporation variations in the WRB.