Ensemble simulation of land evapotranspiration in China based on a multi-forcing and multi-model approach

In order to reduce the uncertainty of offline land surface model (LSM) simulations of land evapotranspiration (ET), we used ensemble simulations based on three meteorological forcing datasets Princeton, ITPCAS (Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Qian] and four LSMs (BATS, VIC, CLM3.0 and CLM3.5), to explore the trends and spatiotemporal characteristics of ET, as well as the spatiotemporal pattern of ET in response to climate factors over mainland China during 1982-2007. The results showed that various simulations of each member and their arithmetic mean (Ens_Mean) could capture the spatial distribution and seasonal pattern of ET sufficiently well, where they exhibited more significant spatial and seasonal variation in the ET compared with observation-based ET estimates (Obs_MTE). For the mean annual ET, we found that the BATS forced by Princeton forcing overestimated the annual mean ET compared with Obs_MTE for most of the basins in China, whereas the VIC forced by Princeton forcing showed underestimations. By contrast, the Ens_Mean was closer to Obs_MTE, although the results were underestimated over Southeast China. Furthermore, both the Obs_MTE and Ens_Mean exhibited a significant increasing trend during 1982-98; whereas after 1998, when the last big EI Niño event occurred, the Ens_Mean tended to decrease significantly between 1999 and 2007, although the change was not significant for Obs_MTE. Changes in air temperature and shortwave radiation played key roles in the long-term variation in ET over the humid area of China, but precipitation mainly controlled the long-term variation in ET in arid and semi-arid areas of China.