Hi - please help me to finally understand the role of ETo in the UC model!
after referencing these other questions (the 2nd of which is mine)
Doubts about urban cooling model
Urban cooling: advice on scenario generation
Reference evapotranspiration raster data
I read in the userguide :
Reference evapotranspiration varies with elevation, latitude, humidity, and slope aspect
and i read at fao
…reference evapotranspiration, denoted as ETo. The reference surface is a hypothetical grass reference crop etc etc
So whatever value I apply, whether its from a local rural site or within my urban location, it is likely to be a single value across my small (15km2) AOI. is that correct?
In that case when the normalized version is used for ETi, ETo/Etmax will always be 1 and Eti = kc
is that correct? But this makes it seem like Eto has no purpose!
Well, I think that’s up to you to decide based on your study area. The Urban Cooling model requires that you provide your ET0 values as a spatial raster, so if you know your reference evapotranspiration to vary spatially, you could have that be reflected in this input.
But I don’t have much experience with this. Maybe @swolny, @jesseG or someone else could weigh in here?
It’s entirely possible that ET0 is consistent across your small AOI. It may also differ, if there are significant differences in elevation or other topographic things that might affect ET. I’m not sure what data you’re considering using, but climate data like ET is usually on the coarse side, ~1km resolution or so. So it could show differences across your AOI, although how real they actually are depends on the source data and how it was processed.