News & views
Evapotranspiration
Towards sharing water better with near
real-time maps on evaporative water
use by crops and natural vegetation
Dennis Baldocchi & Kanishka Mallick
The combination of advancements in
evapotranspiration theory, eddy covariance
flux measurements of water vapour and
satellite remote sensing are putting
technology on the verge of producing
information on evapotranspiration with
unprecedented coverage and resolution. The
OpenET project provides this information
to farmers and land and water managers for
better water practice.
Water is a scarce and precious resource throughout much of the world.
However, it is not always used in a sustainable way by humankind. History
tells us that many civilizations in arid and semi-arid regions, which were
reliant on irrigated agriculture, failed. Their fate was sealed due to the
salts that would accumulate in their soils. Elsewhere across the planet we
see other examples of unsustainable water use, where agriculture mines
above and below groundwater reserves. The Aral Sea has been depleted
due to the overuse of water for irrigated cotton production. Over-drafting
of groundwater in the irrigated basins of the San Joaquin Valley and Ogalla
Aquifer is causing their soil to subside1–3. This increases the energetic cost
of lifting water and damages infrastructure such as canals and roads. We
surely can’t keep using water in such an unsustainable way.
Water is also a contentious and litigious resource. The author
Mark Twain may have said it best: “Whisky is for Drinkin’ and Water
is for Fightin for”. Many irrigated regions, like the Central Valley of
California, use up to 80% of the water appropriated for human use for
growing crops4. This leaves a small fraction of fresh water to provide
drinking water for cities and runoff to maintain water quality in rivers
and estuaries. However, some communities want even more of their
share of water. Driving up and down Interstate 5 in California, drivers
will see signs saying “stop dumping our farm water into the oceans”.
These semi-arid regions are often warm, sunny, and home to
highly productive agriculture. Water use can be the greatest in semi-
arid regions that are supplied with irrigation water5 to maximize the
crop yields. Knowing the amount of water used by evapotranspiration
allows us to use water more effectively for food and fibre production
and allocate sufficient water resources for cities, water ways and
natural landscapes.
Now writing in Nature Water, John Volk et al.6 introduce the OpenET
project, which provides farmers, ranchers and water resource manag-
ers with local and timely information on evaporative water use at sub
field scale (30 m resolution) that is easy to access and digest.
nature water
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00183-5
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Fig. 1 | An Ameriflux Eddy Covariance system measuring water vapour fluxes
over an alfalfa field on Bouldin Island in California, USA.
In the past, evaporative water use was often estimated as a residual
of the water budget (precipitation in minus runoff and soil storage out).
This information was often provided at coarse temporal and spatial
scales and has limited informed decision-making of the water use.
Technology nowadays can produce accurate and high-resolution
evapotranspiration information, such as those produced by OpenET.
A constellation of satellites that circle the globe monitor its surface
temperature, its greenness and the amount of reflected sunlight from
vegetation. These sources of information are ingested into energy
balance models that in turn compute the evaporative water use by
the landscape. Theory has evolved that such evaporation models are
getting more accurate and realistic. Computers, data storage and
geographical information systems have advanced to service data users
with easy to digest maps and time series. In addition, networks of eddy
covariance flux stations (Fig. 1) share their data to the OpenET com-
munity to provide the ground observations needed to vet the models.
OpenET can provide farmers with water use information that can
potentially help them reform irrigation scheduling and increase water
use efficiency, thereby conserving water and saving money. Informed
irrigation scheduling will also help reduce groundwater extraction.
Over natural landscapes, OpenET can provide resource managers with
information about plant and soil water deficits. This information can
alert the managers about the susceptibility of forests and grasslands
Credit: Dennis Baldocchi
to fire and pathogens and on the strength of their carbon sinks. Water
that is not lost via evaporation may be available as soil moisture and
runoff to rivers and dams. Knowing regional evaporation can help
reservoir managers better plan water storage and reservoir releases.
Refined information on watershed water use may also provide pivotal
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information to update water laws and policies based on how much
water is being used and when. In addition, knowing how to use and when
to distribute the water is key to keeping agricultural communities and
their environments viable and sustainable.
We do see room for improvement in the models used. At present,
most of these models use a residual energy balance approach and
assess evaporation as a function of radiative surface temperature.
However, there is a large amount of literature in micrometeorology
showing that the aerodynamic temperature drives energy fluxes not
the radiative temperature7. Mechanistic algorithms are preferred
for computing evapotranspiration in a warmer world, with booms
and busts in rainfall and rising CO2. We contend that evaporation
models are better constrained if they possess photosynthesis and
stomatal conductance submodels8. Doing so increases the fidelity
of the models as they are able to assess the modulating effects of
the photosynthetic pathway, soil moisture deficits, and coupling of
stomatal conductance with the photosynthetic capacity that scales
with nutrition. Models that compute evapotranspiration do a better
job if they can incorporate day and night surface temperature differ-
ences from satellites9.
OpenET shows promise towards a more sustainable way of water
use. To this point we cite John Steinbeck who wrote in East of Eden
“During the dry years, people forgot about the rich years, and when the
wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always
nature water
that way”. But, it does not have to be that way anymore if we make use
of the information such as those provided by OpenET.
Dennis Baldocchi 1 & Kanishka Mallick2
1
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management,
University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. 2Remote Sensing and
Natural Resources Modeling, Department ERIN, Luxembourg Institute
of Science and Technology, Belvaux, Luxembourg.
e-mail: baldocchi@berkeley.edu; kaniska.mallick@gmail.com
Published online: xx xx xxxx
References
1. McDermid, S. et al. Nat. Rev. Earth Environ. 4, 435–453 (2023).
2. Famiglietti, J. S. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. https://doi.org/10.1029/2010GL046442 (2011).
3. Famiglietti, J. S. & Rodell, M. Science 340, 1300–1301 (2013).
4. Hanak, E. et al. Managing California’s Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation (Public Policy
Institute of California, 2011).
5. Sinclair, T. R., Tanner, C. B. & Bennett, J. Bioscience 34, 36–40 (1984).
6. Volk, J. M. et al. Nat. Water https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-023-00181-7 (2024).
7. Verma, S. B. in Estimation of Areal Evapotranspiration Vol. 177 (ed. Black, T. A.) 13–20 (IAHS,
1989).
8. Ryu, Y. et al. Glob. Biogeochem. Cycle 25, GB4017 (2011).
9. Bhattacharya, B. K. et al. Biogeosciences 19, 5521–5551 (2022).
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.