Research brief: Evapotranspiration shows an increasing trend since 1980

Climate change is affecting the amount of water evaporating (from soils and surfaces) and transpiring (evaporating through plant leaves) from the land surface. Trends derived from DOLCE V3 show clear increases in ET since 1980 over the majority of the Earth’s surface.

Picture: Trees in the mist. Credit: Johannes Plenio (Pexels).

Climate change is affecting the amount of water evaporating (from soils and surfaces) and transpiring (evaporating through plant leaves) from the land surface. Previous reports of trends in global evapotranspiration (the combination of evaporation and transpiration, ET) are however inconsistent, mainly owing to uncertainties in the estimates used to derive these trends.

This paper combines several existing ET products and field measurements of ET from global flux networks and derives two hybrid ET products using a weighting approach. Evaluation using independent field measurements showed that the new ET products, DOLCE V2 and DOLCE V3, match measurements more closely than any other assessed dataset.

Trends derived from DOLCE V3 show clear increases in ET since 1980 over the majority of the Earth’s surface.

Paper: Hobeichi, S., Abramowitz, G., and Evans, J. P.: Robust historical evapotranspiration trends across climate regimes, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 25, 3855–3874, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-3855-2021, 2021.