Research on the Scale Effect of the Evapotranspiration Retrieved by Satellite Sensors

Evapotranspiration (ET) plays an important role in energy exchange and hydrological cycle between the land surface and atmosphere. Over the last decades, scientists have developed many models and algorithms to have a better determination of regional ET by remote sensing data. However, at regional scale, the field measured data and remote sensing data are inconsistent with each other due to the underlying surface heterogeneity. In this study, remotely sensed ET was carried out using Landsat ETM+ and MODIS data to understand the role of landscape heterogeneity and its influence on the scaling behavior of surface fluxes. This knowledge is very useful for correction of scale error of ET estimation, and can also be used to study the spatio-temporal effect of remotely sensed ET, which is going to be carried out in the future.