Obtaining climate grids describing distinct variables is important for developing
better climate studies.
These grids are also useful products for other researchers
and end users.
The atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) may be measured in terms of the
reference evapotranspiration (ETo), a key variable for
understanding water and energy terrestrial balances and an important variable in
climatology, hydrology and agronomy.
Despite its importance, the calculation of ETo is not commonly undertaken, mainly because datasets consisting of
a high number of climate variables are required and some of the required variables are not
commonly available. To address this problem, a strategy based on the spatial interpolation of climate
variables prior to the calculation of ETo using FAO-56
Penman–Monteith equation was followed to obtain an ETo database for
continental Spain and the Balearic Islands, covering the 1961–2014 period at a
spatial resolution of 1.1 km and at a weekly temporal resolution.
In this database, values for the radiative and aerodynamic components as well as the
estimated uncertainty related to ETo were also provided. This database is available for download in the Network Common Data Form (netCDF) at
https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/8615 (Tomas-Burguera et al., 2019).
A map visualization tool (http://speto.csic.es, last access: 10 December 2019) is available to help users
download the data corresponding to one specific point in comma-separated values (csv) format. A relevant number of research areas could take advantage...

Reference crop evapotranspiration database in Spain (1961–2014)

10.5194/essd-11-1917-2019