Assessment of the EUMETSAT LSA-SAF evapotranspiration product for drought monitoring in Europe

Results show the potential of ET/ET0 to characterize soil moisture variability, and to give additional information to fAPAR and to precipitation distribution for drought assessment. The main limitations of the proposed ratio for drought characterization are discussed, including options to overcome them. These options include the use of filters to discriminate areas with a low percentage vegetation cover or areas that are not in their growing period and the use of evapotranspiration without water restriction (ETwwr), obtained as output of the LSA-SAF model instead of ET0. The ET/ETwwr ratio was tested by comparing its accumulated values per growing period with the winter wheat yield values per country published by Eurostat. The results point to the potential of using the remote sensing based LSA-SAF evapotranspiration and the ET/ETwwr ratio for vegetation monitoring at large scale, especially in areas where data is generally lacking.