Important factors governing the incompatible trends of annual pan evaporation: evidence from a small scale region

Many studies reported the coexisting trends of decreasing and increasing pan evaporation in some large scale regions. This study proved that the coexisting trends also occurred in small scale region as well as in large scale region. To discover the important factors governing the incompatible trends of annual pan evaporation, annual climatic data of ten meteorological stations at the Liaohe Delta over recent 45 years were analyzed by the partial correlation analysis, and the results showed the strongest statistically correlation between annual relative humidity and annual pan evaporation. Researches on two extreme cases suggested there was obvious contrary trend between annual relative humidity and annual pan evaporation for one case, in despite of slight contrary trend for another case. Generally, annual relative humidity most likely was an important factor relating to the trend of annual pan evaporation. At the same time, an expanded urbanization and irrigation were seen around these meteorological stations. Urbanization and irrigation exerted opposite effects on pan evaporation, they therefore were speculated to be the ultimately inducements causing unbalanced relative humidity, and led to incompatible pan evaporation.