ET-WB: Global Terrestrial Evaporation and Water Balance

ET-WB provides monthly water balance data for 168 major river basins and global land from May 2002 to December 2021. The dataset integrates 23 precipitation, 29 runoff, and 7 terrestrial water storage change sources into a multi-dimensional matrix. It is distributed in Mat, NetCDF, and Shapefile formats for hydrological and climatological analysis.

Use Cases

• Estimating terrestrial evaporation using water balance closure across 169 regions.
• Analyzing long-term hydrological trends from 2002-2021 across multiple data sources.
• Comparing ensemble median values of water balance components via provided shapefiles.
• Validating climate and hydrological models against a multi-source observational dataset.

Strengths

• Integrates a large ensemble of 59 distinct input datasets (23 precipitation, 29 runoff, 7 storage).
• Provides consistent monthly data over a 20-year period (May 2002 - Dec 2021).
• Covers a comprehensive spatial scope of 168 major river basins plus global land.

Limitations

• Specific column names and granular data schema are not detailed in the provided metadata.
• The exact data volume (rows/size) is unspecified across all platform entries.
• Relies on inference from descriptions; direct documentation (Readme) is referenced but not provided.

Provenance

Source

Xiong Jinghua, Wuhan University, associated with the ESSD paper 'ET-WB: water balance-based estimations of terrestrial evaporation over global land and major global basins' (2023).

Collection Method

Derived from an ensemble of 59 existing global precipitation, runoff, and terrestrial water storage change datasets.

Time Range

May 2002 to December 2021

Geography

Global land (excluding Antarctica and Greenland) and 168 major river basins.