Evaluation of the complementary relationship using noah land surface model and north american regional reanalysis (NARR) data to estimate evapotranspiration in semiarid ecosystems

Estimating evapotranspiration using the complementary relationship can serve as a proxy to more sophisticated physically based approaches and can be used to better understand water and energy budget feedbacks. The authors investigated the existence of complementarity between actual evapotranspiration (ET) and potential ET (ET_p) over natural vegetation in semiarid desert ecosystems of southern Idaho using only the forcing data and simulated fluxes obtained from Noah land surface model (LSM) and North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) data. To mitigate the paucity of long-term meteorological data, the Noah LSM-simulated fluxes and the NARR forcing data were used in the advection-aridity (AA) model to derive the complementary relationship (CR) for the sagebrush and cheatgrass ecosystems. When soil moisture was a limiting factor for ET, the CR was stable and asymmetric, with b values of 2.43 and 1.43 for sagebrush and cheatgrass, respectively. Higher b values contributed to decreased ET and increased ET_p, and as a result ET from the sagebrush community was less compared to that of cheatgrass. Validation of the derived CR showed that correlations between daily ET from the Noah LSM and CR-based ET were 0.76 and 0.80 for sagebrush and cheatgrass, respectively, while the root-mean-square errors were 0.53 and 0.61 mm day^-1.