Global Trends in Evapotranspiration Dominated by Increases across Large Cropland Regions

Abstract

Irrigated croplands require large annual water inputs and are critical to global food production. Actual evapotranspiration (AET) is a main index of water use in croplands, and several remote-sensing products have been developed to quantify AET at the global scale. In this study, we estimate global trends in actual AET, potential ET (PET), and precipitation rate (PP) utilizing the MODIS Evapotranspiration product (2001–2018) within the Google Earth Engine cloud-computing environment. We then introduce a new index based on a combination of AET, PET, and PP estimates—the evapotranspiration warning index (ETWI)—which we use to evaluate the sustainability of observed AET trends. We show that while AET has not considerably changed across global natural lands, it has significantly increased across global croplands (+14% ± 5%). The average ETWI for global croplands is −0.40 ± 0.25, which is largely driven by an extreme trend in AET, exceeding both PET and PP trends. Furthermore, the trends in water and energy limited areas demonstrate, on a global scale, while AET and PET do not have significant trends in both water and energy limited areas, the increasing trend of PP in energy-limited areas is more than water-limited areas. Averaging cropland ETWI trends at the country level further revealed nonsustainable trends in cropland water consumptions in Thailand, Brazil, and China. These regions were also found to experiencing some of the largest increases in net primary production (NPP) and solar-induced fluorescence (SIF), suggesting that recent increases in food production may be dependent on unsustainable water inputs. Globally, irrigated maize was found to be associated with nonsustainable AET trends relative to other crop types. We present an online open access application designed to enable near real-time monitoring and improve the understanding of global water consumption and availability.

Seasonal Cropland Trends and Their Nexus with Agrometeorological Parameters in the Indus River Plain

“…The cropland trend and nexus results imply that AET and ESI in IRP's cropland have also improved significantly during the study period. The AET improvement in regional cropland fall in line with past global-scale research of Javadian et al [36]. The study identified a significant increase of AET in regional croplands compared to no significant increase in natural vegetation worldwide.…”

Concurrent and Lagged Effects of Extreme Drought Induce Net Reduction in Vegetation Carbon Uptake on Tibetan Plateau

“…In recent years, many drought indices have been developed, including the Evaporative Stress Index [33], Reconnaissance Drought Index [34], Evaporative Demand Drought Index [35], Evapotranspiration Warning Index [36], Palmer Drought Severity Index [37], Standardised Precipitation Index [38], and Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) [39], and the latter three drought indices are the most popular. The Palmer Drought Severity Index can simultaneously monitor wetness and dryness [37], but it has a strong calibration period influence and issues with spatial comparability that limit its application in other areas, with subjectivity between drought conditions and index values [39].…”

Severe Drought in the Spring of 2020 in Poland—More of the Same?

“…For three analyzed stations, the worrying situation is that trends for reference crop evapotranspiration (ET 0 ) significantly increased and at the same time the precipitation total remained nearly unchanged (slightly increased or decreased). Additionally, as Javadian et al demonstrated [44], actual evapotranspiration (AET) has significantly increased across global croplands (+14% ± 5%). Global analysis shows that the increasing trend in AET is also visible in Poland.…”