Paper Info
Title
A Comprehensive Study on Factors Affecting the Calibration of Potential Evapotranspiration Derived from the Thornthwaite Model
Abstract
Potential evapotranspiration (PET) is generally estimated using empirical models; thus, how to improve PET estimation accuracy has received widespread attention in recent years. Among all the models, although the temperature-driven Thornthwaite (TH) model is easy to operate, its estimation accuracy is rather limited. Although previous researchers proved that the accuracy of TH-PET can be greatly improved by using a limited number of variables to conduct calibration exercises, only preliminary experiments were conducted. In this study, to refine this innovation practice, we comprehensively investigated the factors that affect the calibration performances, including the selection of variables, seasonal effects, and spatial distribution of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/weather stations. By analyzing the factors and their effects, the following conclusions have been drawn: (1) an optimal variable selection scheme containing zenith total delay, temperature, pressure, and mean Julian Date was proposed; (2) the most salient improvements are in the winter and summer seasons, with improvement rates over 80%; (3) with the changes in horizontal (2.771-44.723 km) and height (1.239-344.665 m) differences among ten pairs of GNSS/weather stations, there are no obvious differences in the performances. These findings can offer an in-depth understanding of this practice and provide technical references to future applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.3390/rs14184644
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
potential evapotranspiration, global navigation satellite system (GNSS), zenith total delay, Thornthwaite equation, Penman-Monteith equation
Journal
14
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
18
2072-4292
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Haobo Li100.34
Chenhui Jiang200.68
suelynn choy353.80
Xiaoming Wang45712.72
Kefei Zhang501.35
Dejun Zhu600.68