A daily and 500 m coupled evapotranspiration and gross primary production product across China during 2000–2020

Abstract. Accurate high-resolution actual evapotranspiration (ET) and gross primary production (GPP) information is essential for understanding the large-scale water and carbon dynamics. However, substantial uncertainties exist in the current ET and GPP datasets in China because of insufficient local ground measurements used for model constraint. This study utilizes a water–carbon coupled model, Penman–Monteith–Leuning Version 2 (PML-V2), to estimate 500 m ET and GPP at a daily scale. The parameters of PML-V2(China) were well calibrated against observations of 26 eddy covariance flux towers across nine plant functional types in China, indicated by a Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) of 0.75 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.69 mm d−1 for daily ET, respectively, and a NSE of 0.82 and a RMSE of 1.71 g C m−2 d−1 for daily GPP. The model estimates get a small Bias of 6.28 % and a high NSE of 0.82 against water-balance annual ET estimates across 10 major river basins in China. Further evaluations suggest that the newly developed product is better than other typical products (MOD16A2, SEBAL, GLEAM, MOD17A2H, VPM, and EC-LUE) in estimating both ET and GPP. Moreover, PML-V2(China) accurately monitors the intra-annual variations in ET and GPP in the croplands with a dual-cropping system. The new data showed that, during 2001–2018, the annual GPP and water use efficiency experienced a significant (p<0.001) increase (8.99 g C m−2 yr−2 and 0.02 g C mm−1 H2O yr−1, respectively), but annual ET showed a non-significant (p>0.05) increase (0.43 mm yr−2). This indicates that vegetation in China exhibits a huge potential for carbon sequestration with little cost in water resources. The PML-V2(China) product provides a great opportunity for academic communities and various agencies for scientific studies and applications, freely available at https://doi.org/10.11888/Terre.tpdc.272389 (Zhang and He, 2022).