Main influencing factors of terrestrial evapotranspiration for different land cover types over the Tibetan Plateau in 1982–2014

Abstract

Introduction: Terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) has important implications for the global water cycle, climate change, and ecosystem, and its changes and driving factors have drawn increasing attention. Previous research studies have minimally quantified the effects and identified the pathways of the influencing factors on ET over different land surface types.Methods: In this study, we analyze the spatiotemporal distribution and variation of ET over the TP in 1982–2014 based on multiple datasets. Furthermore, the effects of each influencing factor on ET are quantified over different land surface types, and the major influencing factors and their affecting pathways are identified using structure equation modeling (SEM), which is a statistical method used to analyze relationships among multiple variables.Results: The results show that the climatology of ET decreases gradually from southeastern to northwestern TP, with the maximum spatial averaged value of 379.979 ± 0.417 mm a−1 for the fifth generation of European Reanalysis (ERA5) and the minimum of 249.899 ± 0.469 mm a−1 for the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS). The most significant differences among the ET datasets mainly occur in the summer. The annual ET averaged over the TP presents an increased trend from 1982 to 2014, as shown by all of the ET datasets. However, there are larger discrepancies in the spatial distribution of the increased trend for these datasets. The assessment result shows that the 0.05° land evapotranspiration dataset for the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (LEDQTP) has the highest temporal correlation coefficient (0.80) and the smallest root-mean-square error (23.50 mm) compared to the observations. Based on LEDQTP, we find that precipitation is the main influencing factor of ET, which primarily affects ET through direct pathways in bare soil and grassland regions, with standardized estimates of 0.521 and 0.606, respectively. However, in meadow and shrub and forest regions, the primary factor influencing ET is air temperature, which is primarily affected by an indirect pathway through a vapor pressure deficit. Air temperature is also the controlling factor in sparse vegetation regions, but it affects ET through a direct pathway.Discussion: This study may provide some new useful information on the effects of climate change on ET in different land cover types over the TP.