5.0 Conclusions
The WaPOR products for Africa and the Middle East provide the highest resolution continuous near-real-time products available so far to monitor ETIa. Current validation efforts need to be continued and intensified to confirm the suitability of these products for various uses. However, significant issues with the sparseness of available ground-truth measurements make direct validation to in-situ, insufficient as a sole means to validate the ETIa product over continental Africa. To compensate for insufficient ground-truth locations, we added physical consistency and level consistency checks as part of the validation analyses. Results suggest that the ETIa-WPR are responsive to general trends associated with climate types. In dry irrigated areas, WaPOR appears to be overestimating ETa, particularly the coarse resolution. Analysis of the intermediate data components provide insights into some of the possible causes of the over- and underestimation of ETI-WPR, which appear to be primarily driven by an overestimation of the SMC which is driving overestimation of evaporation. The WaPOR database shows promising results, with an overall MAPE of 29-31% from local to basin scale, particularly considering it presents a continental almost near real time open-access dataset. Further validation activities are suggested as new ground-data become available, particularly in cropped and irrigated areas.