Triple Collocation-Based Uncertainty Analysis and Data Fusion of Multi-Source Evapotranspiration Data Across China

Accurate estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) is critical for understanding land-atmospheric interactions. Despite the advancement in ET measurement, a single ET estimate still suffers from inherent uncertainties. Data fusion provides a viable option for improving ET estimation by leveraging the strengths of individual ET products, especially the triple collocation (TC) method, which has a prominent advantage in not relying on the availability of “ground truth” data. In this work, we proposed a framework for uncertainty analysis and data fusion based on the extended TC (ETC) and multiple TC (MTC) variants. Three different sources of ET products, i.e., the Global Land Evaporation and Amsterdam Model (GLEAM), the fifth generation of European Reanalysis-Land (ERA5-Land), and the complementary relationship model (CR), were selected as the TC triplet. The analyses were conducted based on different climate zones and land cover types across China. Results show that ETC presents outstanding performance as most areas conform to the zero-error correlations assumption, while nearly half of the areas violate this assumption when using MTC. In addition, the ETC method derives a lower root mean square error (RMSE) and higher correlation coefficient (Corr) than the MTC one over most climate zones and land cover types. Among the ET products, GLEAM performs the best, while CR performs the worst. The merged ET estimates from both ETC and MTC methods are generally superior to the original triplets at the site scale. The findings indicate that the TC-based method could be a reliable tool for uncertainty analysis and data fusion.