Project Description

We propose to utilize Maurer et al., (2002) gridded weather data to estimate historical open water evaporation at USBR water bodies of interest (roughly 10 water bodies covering the 8 major Reclamation basins as defined in the SECURE Water Act). These historical evaporation estimates will provide bench mark datasets to compare and contrast to VIC open water evaporation estimates, and other historical open water evaporation estimates made by the USBR using pan data and other methods such as simple temperature functions. In addition, these gridded datasets will provide the ability to validate existing empirical relationships, and/or provide the ability to develop new empirical relationships for estimating future solar radiation and dew point temperature based on GCM Tmax and Tmin, similar to the methods outlined by Huntington and Allen (2010).