Estimation of high-resolution terrestrial evapotranspiration from Landsat data using a simple Taylor skill fusion method

Estimation of high-resolution terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) from Landsat data is important in many climatic, hydrologic, and agricultural applications, as it can help bridging the gap between existing coarse-resolution ET products and point-based field measurements. However, there is large uncertainty among existing ET products from Landsat that limit their application. This study presents a simple Taylor skill fusion (STS) method that merges five Landsat-based ET products and directly measured ET from eddy covariance (EC) to improve the global estimation of terrestrial ET. The STS method uses a weighted average of the individual ET products and weights are determined by their Taylor skill scores (S). The validation with site-scale measurements at 206 EC flux towers showed large differences and uncertainties among the five ET products. The merged ET product exhibited the best performance with a decrease in the averaged root-mean-square error (RMSE) by 2–5 W/m2 when compared to the individual products. To evaluate the reliability of the STS method at the regional scale, the weights of the STS method for these five ET products were determined using EC ground-measurements. An example of regional ET mapping demonstrates that the STS-merged ET can effectively integrate the individual Landsat ET products. Our proposed method provides an improved high-resolution ET product for identifying agricultural crop water consumption and providing a diagnostic assessment for global land surface models

Earlier snowmelt may lead to late season declines in plant productivity and carbon sequestration in Arctic tundra ecosystems

Abstract Arctic warming is affecting snow cover and soil hydrology, with consequences for carbon sequestration in tundra ecosystems. The scarcity of observations in the Arctic has limited our understanding of the impact of covarying environmental drivers on the carbon balance of tundra ecosystems. In this study, we address some of these uncertainties through a novel record of 119 site-years of summer data from eddy covariance towers representing dominant tundra vegetation types located on continuous permafrost in the Arctic. Here we found that earlier snowmelt was associated with more tundra net CO₂ sequestration and higher gross primary productivity (GPP) only in June and July, but with lower net carbon sequestration and lower GPP in August. Although higher evapotranspiration (ET) can result in soil drying with the progression of the summer, we did not find significantly lower soil moisture with earlier snowmelt, nor evidence that water stress affected GPP in the late growing season. Our results suggest that the expected increased CO₂ sequestration arising from Arctic warming and the associated increase in growing season length may not materialize if tundra ecosystems are not able to continue sequestering CO₂ later in the season

The FLUXNET2015 dataset and the ONEFlux processing pipeline for eddy covariance data

Abstract The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as gap-filled time series, ecosystem respiration and photosynthetic uptake estimates, estimation of uncertainties, and metadata about the measurements, presented for the first time in this paper. In addition, 206 of these sites are for the first time distributed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. This paper details this enhanced dataset and the processing methods, now made available as open-source codes, making the dataset more accessible, transparent, and reproducible