Impact of flooded rice paddy on remotely sensed evapotranspiration in the Krishna River basin, India

Abstract

Evapotranspiration (ET) is one of the major water exchange processes between the earth's surface and the atmosphere. ET is a combined process of evaporation from open water bodies, bare soil and plant surfaces, and transpiration from vegetation. Remote sensing‐based ET models have been developed to estimate spatially distributed ET over large regions, however, many of them reportedly underestimate ET over semi‐arid regions (Jamshidi et al., Journal of Hydrometeorology, 2019, 20, 947–964). In this work, we show that underestimation of ET can occur due to the open water evaporation from flooded rice paddies ignored in the existing ET models. To address the gap in ET estimation, we have develop..