Plants, Vital Players in the Terrestrial Water Cycle

Plant transpiration accounts for about half of all terrestrial evaporation. Plants need water for many vital functions including nutrient uptake, growth and leaf cooling. The regulation of plant water transport by stomata in the leaves leads to the loss of 97% of the water that is taken up via their roots, to the atmosphere. Measuring plant...

Correcting Thornthwaite potential evapotranspiration using a global grid of local coefficients to support temperature-based estimations of reference evapotranspiration and aridity indices

Thornthwaite's formula is globally an optimum candidate for large-scale applications of potential evapotranspiration and aridity assessment at different climates and landscapes since it has lower data requirements compared to other methods and especially from the ASCE-standardized reference evapotranspiration (formerly FAO-56), which is the...