Evapotranspiration uncertainty at micrometeorological scales: the impact of the eddy covariance energy imbalance and correction methods

Under ideal conditions, evapotranspiration (ET) fluxes derived through the eddy covariance (EC) technique are considered a direct measure of actual ET. Eddy covariance flux measurements provide estimates at a temporal frequency that allows examining sub-daily, daily, and seasonal scale processes and relationships between different surface fluxes. The Grape Remote Sensing Atmospheric Profile and Evapotranspiration eXperiment (GRAPEX) project has collected micrometeorological and biophysical data to ground-truth new remote sensing tools for fine-tuning vineyard irrigation management across numerous sites since 2013. This rich dataset allows us to quantify the impact of different approaches to estimate daily ET fluxes, while accounting for energy imbalance. This imbalance results from the lack of agreement between the total available energy and turbulent fluxes derived by the EC technique. We found that different approaches to deal with this energy imbalance can lead to uncertainty in daily ET estimates of up to 50%. Over the growing season, this uncertainty can lead to considerable biases in crop water use estimates, which in some cases were equivalent to ~ 1/3rd of the total growing season applied irrigation We analyzed ET uncertainty relative to atmospheric meteorological, stability, and advective conditions, and highlight the importance of recognizing limitations of micrometeorological observational techniques, considered state of the art, to quantify ET for model validation and field-scale monitoring. This study provides a framework to quantify daily ET estimates’ uncertainty and expected reliability when using the eddy covariance technique for ground-truthing or model validation purposes.