Uncertainties in evapotranspiration projections associated with estimation methods and CMIP6 GCMs for South Korea

This study compared the performance capabilities of three potential evapotranspiration (PET) methods, Thornthwaite (TW), Hargreaves and Samani (HS), and Penman-Monteith (PM), to simulate historical and future daily PET levels in South Korea using climate variables from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) Global Climate Models (GCMs). Five evaluation metrics were used to quantify the reproducibility of the climate variables and PETs at ten stations in South Korea for the historical period used here (1985–2014). The changes and uncertainty associated with the changes in PET in the near (2031–2060) and far (2071–2100) futures were calculated for two shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) of 2–4.5 and 5–8.5. As a result, PETs estimated using the three methods for the historical period showed high performance in terms of five evaluation metrics. Overall, PETs showed an increase for both the future periods and the SSPs. The PET estimated using the PM method showed the greatest increase, while that estimated using HS showed the most modest increase in the future. The PM method also showed the highest reliability and lowest uncertainty in the PET estimations, while the opposite was true for HS. This study contributes to our understanding of rational PET methods by which to calculate hydrological factors such as drought indexes for future periods via GCM simulations.