A Distributed Benchmarking Framework for Actual ET Models

With the various types of actual ET models being developed in the last 20 years, it becomes necessary to inter-compare methods. Most of already published ETa models comparisons address few number of models, and small to medium areas (Chemin et al., 2010; Gao & Long, 2008; Garcia et al., 2007; Suleiman et al., 2008; Timmermans et al., 2007). With the large amount of remote sensing data covering the Earth, and the daily information available for the past ten years (i.e. Aqua/Terra-MODIS) for each pixel location, it becomes paramount to have a more complete comparison, in space and time. To address this new experimental requirement, a distributed computing framework was designed, and created. The design architecture was built from original satellite datasets to various levels of processing until reaching the requirement of various ETa models input dataset. Each input product is computed once and reused in all ETa models requiring such input. This permits standardization of inputs as much as possible to zero-in variations of models to the models internals/specificities.