Remote sensing used to estimate land surface evaporation

Land surface evaporation links the global water, energy and carbon cycles. Currently, there are neither in situ networks nor established procedures for mapping fields of this important variable. Remotely-sensed data have the coverage necessary for mapping; what is lagging is the ability to infer evaporation from space-borne radiometric measurements. Established inference procedures must be free from empiricism and should not require auxiliary data on effects such as soil hydraulics and vegetation water relationships that are difficult to scale.