RM-OBS/PU Potential Evapotranspiration and Supporting Forcing L4 3-hourly 0.25x0.25 degree V002 (PET_PU_3H025)

The FAO equation is a specific application of the Penman-Monteith equation for crop and short-grass reference surfaces and is based on surface net radiation, near-surface air temperature, wind speed, and specific humidity (Allen, 1998). As a follow-on to PET_PU_3H025 Version 1, PET_PU_3H025 Version 2 seeks to continue to reduce the error from the input meteorological forcing and provide a variety of widely-used PET methods for different research and application purposes.

The modifications include the addition of the FAO tall reference crop equation, an extension of the radiation data and temporal coverage, the usage of the GLASS satellite albedo to estimate upward short-wave radiation and the estimation of ground heat flux based on diurnal phase shift of net radiation. This second version of the dataset is estimated at a 3 hourly temporal resolution and 0.25x0.25 degrees spatial resolution globally, spanning the 33-year period 1984-2016.

Datasets are stored as a 3-dimensional array with dimension 720 x 1440 x 8 for each day, in NetCDF-4 format. The DOI for version 1 of the data is: 10.5067/GPZDZYELYG1A.