Offline Daily Evapotranspiration Datasets Based on Downscaled High-resolution CMIP6 Simulations in Australia
<p>Quantifying the impact of climate change on actual and potential evapotranspiration (AET and PET) is essential for water security, agriculture production and environmental management. AET and PET are strongly influenced by local factors such as topography, land cover and soil moisture, which limits the usability of global climate models for their projections. Here, we dynamically downscale Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models using Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM) to a 10km resolution over Australia and derive AET and PET at a daily time step using the Morton method and project future changes under SSP126, 245 and 370. Three AET / PET datasets are provided by Queensland Government Climate Projection Service team, which include Areal AET, Wet Environment Areal PET and Point PET. These datasets are computed offline based on Morton’s Complementary Relationship Areal Evapotranspiration (CRAE) model.</p>
<p>In addition, we also provide datasets for Pan Evaporation (linear regression model), Short and Tall Crop Reference Evapotranspiration (Penman–Monteith model) and Shallow Lake Evaporation (Morton’s Complementary Relationship Wet-surface Evaporation CRWE model). They have used dynamically downscaled CMIP6 models datasets as input.</p>
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Creation)
- 2025-05-01
- Date (Publication)
- 2025-07-21
- Date (Revision)
- 2025-12-10
- Edition
- 1.0
Identifier
Publisher
Author
State Government of Queensland - Zhang, Hong ()
33 Charlotte Street, Brisbane, 4000, Queensland, Australia
Brisbane
Queensland
4000
Australia
Author
State Government of Queensland
33 Charlotte Street, Brisbane, 4000, Queensland, Australia
Brisbane
Queensland
4000
Australia
- Website
- https://www.tern.org.au/
- Purpose
- <p>Evaporation or Evapotranspiration plays a key role in the water cycle, crop irrigation and forestry. However, modelling evaporation or evapotranspiration is more challenging due to the complexity of the water cycle, its spatial and temporal variability and uncertainties in climate models. Actual evapotranspiration (AET) is often said to be the most difficult water balance component to directly measure due to the high costs of installation and maintenance (e.g., eddy-covariance flux towers – 26 OzFlux in Australia). Potential evaporation (PE) can be quantified from a spatial network of pan evaporation data dating back to 1975, but the station observation network of pan evaporation has been declining since 2010. Thus, models for the prediction of AET and PET are still nowadays preferred due to the relatively simplicity of computation and in the large availability of meteorological data required for the simulation. These datasets are required in various fields such as hydrology, irrigation management, water budgeting, trading and management. They are also applied to assess the water stress and compute drought indices (e.g., Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index -SPEI). Besides, ET data are essential to study compounding extremes (e.g., hydroclimate volatility indices, atmospheric thirstiness indices).</p>
- Credit
- We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
- Status
- Completed
Point of contact
State Government of Queensland - Zhang, Hong ()
33 Charlotte Street, Brisbane, 4000, Queensland, Australia
33 Charlotte Street
Brisbane
Queensland
4000
Australia
Point of contact
State Government of Queensland
33 Charlotte Street, Brisbane, 4000, Queensland, Australia
33 Charlotte Street
Brisbane
Queensland
4000
Australia
- Topic category
-
- Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
Extent
N
S
E
W
))
Temporal extent
- Time period
- 1981-01-01 2100-12-31
- Maintenance and update frequency
- Not planned
- GCMD Science Keywords
- ANZSRC Fields of Research
- TERN Parameter Vocabulary
- QUDT Units of Measure
- GCMD Horizontal Resolution Ranges
- GCMD Temporal Resolution Ranges
Resource constraints
- Use limitation
- The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and create derivative works provided that they credit the original source and any other nominated parties. Details are provided at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- File name
- 88x31.png
- File description
- CCBy Logo from creativecommons.org
- File type
- png
- Title
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
- Alternate title
- CC-BY
- Edition
- 4.0
- Access constraints
- License
- Use constraints
- Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- TERN services are provided on an "as-is" and "as available" basis. Users use any TERN services at their discretion and risk. They will be solely responsible for any damage or loss whatsoever that results from such use including use of any data obtained through TERN and any analysis performed using the TERN infrastructure. <br />Web links to and from external, third party websites should not be construed as implying any relationships with and/or endorsement of the external site or its content by TERN. <br /><br />Please advise any work or publications that use this data via the online form at https://www.tern.org.au/research-publications/#reporting
- Other constraints
- Please cite this dataset as {Author} ({PublicationYear}). {Title}. {Version, as appropriate}. Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. Dataset. {Identifier}.
Resource constraints
- Classification
- Unclassified
- Supplemental Information
- <p>It is important to note several uncertainties associated with the datasets. Firstly, AET and PET are complex phenomena and may not be represented ideally using one model (e.g., Morton’s model). Thus, comparison with other nonlinear-CR models or water balance formulas may provide further insights in future studies. Second, the uncertainty surrounding emissions scenarios and the CMIP6 downscaled projections leads to subsequent uncertainty for future projections of AET in Australia. Lastly and most importantly, the uncertainty in AET projections is closely related to precipitation uncertainties of CMIP6 projections, which vary significantly across Australia. Despite these limitations, our study provides valuable outcomes, which will be useful for policymakers and scientists to establish climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies and to effectively manage water resources.</p>
Distribution Information
- Distribution format
-
Distributor
Distributor
Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
80 Meiers Road, Indooroopilly, Queensland, 4068, Australia
Indooroopilly
Queensland
4068
Australia
- OnLine resource
- NetCDF - Offline Daily Evapotranspiration Data
- OnLine resource
- ro-crate-metadata.json
Data quality info
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Other
- Data quality was evaluated against OzFlux AET measurements. QldFCP-2 AET datasets performs well and is ranked the second best.
- Title
- Projections of actual and potential evapotranspiration from downscaled high-resolution CMIP6 climate simulations in Australia
- Abstract
- Projections of actual and potential evapotranspiration from downscaled high-resolution CMIP6 climate simulations in Australia
Report
Result
- Statement
- <br></br>The performance of the various AET products was evaluated against 26 OzFlux towers in Australia. The percentage errors vary depending on the location of the flux tower. <ul> <li>CSIRO MODIS ReScaled EvapoTranspiration (CMRSET) AET estimates had the highest agreement with OzFlux and the smallest mean percent errors, averaging 15.7% across all 26 available flux towers. </li> <li>The ensemble average of the unadjusted QldFCP-2 dataset also performed well, with the second lowest average percent errors (17%) from all flux tower sites. </li> <li>In comparison, Scientific Information for Land Owners (SILO) had the highest mean percent error at 44%. </li> <li>For other AET products, the mean percent error ranged from 21.5% to 27%. </li> </ul> This indicates that QldFCP-2 can provide valuable AET estimates, with similar or less bias to other remote sensing or reanalysis AET products. Within the QldFCP-2 dataset, the percentage errors vary from site to site and across the individual models, with the highest error (110.5%) obtained at the Samford OzFlux tower from the MPI-ESM1-2-LR model and the lowest error (0.1%) obtained at the Warra OzFlux tower from the CNRM-CM6-1-HR atmosphere only model.
Resource lineage
- Statement
- <p>Using dynamically downscaled CMIP6 climate models datasets at a 10 km resolution as input, we assess AET and PET at a daily time step using the Morton method and project future changes to AET and PET for Australia. Morton’s Point PET, Wet Environment Areal PET, Areal AET are based on symmetric complementary relationship (Complementary Relationship Areal Evapotranspiration - CRAE model). The year range is 1981 – 2100. Three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) considered include SSP126, 245 and 370.</p> <p>We also provide evaporation and evapotranspiration datasets for the following four variables:</p> <ul> <li>Pan Evaporation datasets (linear regression model);</li> <li>Short Crop Reference Evapotranspiration (Penman–Monteith model);</li> <li>Tall Crop Reference Evapotranspiration (Penman–Monteith model);</li> <li>Shallow Lake Evaporation (Morton’s Complementary Relationship Wet-surface Evaporation CRWE model).</li> </ul>
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
Reference System Information
- Reference system identifier
- EPSG/EPSG:4326
- Reference system type
- Geodetic Geographic 2D
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
-
urn:uuid/27c04442-6cf6-4513-9938-3d62848de775
- Title
- TERN GeoNetwork UUID
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Point of contact
Type of resource
- Resource scope
- Dataset
- Metadata linkage
-
https://geonetwork.tern.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/27c04442-6cf6-4513-9938-3d62848de775
Point-of-truth metadata URL
- Date info (Creation)
- 2025-05-07T00:00:00.000000+00:00
- Date info (Revision)
- 2025-12-10T10:06:19.141512+00:00
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO 19115-1:2014/AMD 1:2018 Geographic information - Metadata - Fundamentals
- Edition
- 1
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO/TS 19115-3:2016
- Edition
- 1.0
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO/TS 19157-2:2016
- Edition
- 1.0
- Title
- Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-3:2016 and ISO 19157-2:2016
- Date (published)
- 2021
- Edition
- 1.0
Identifier
Overviews
Spatial extent
N
S
E
W
Provided by
Associated resources
Not available