Abstract

Surface vapor pressure (SVP) is a highly significant variable for physically based crop growth simulating and crop yield modeling. Regional spatially representative data of observed SVP are not currently available. However, an excellent correlation has been found between SVP and precipitable water vapor (PWV) with many previous works. Based on the correlation analysis between satellite-derived PWV data moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) atmospheric profileproduct dataset and daily mean SVP data calculated from 37 ground-based meteorology stations measurements in Haihe River Basin of North China, an operational scheme for estimating daily SVP with satellite-derived PWV data was proposed in this study. The accuracy of the approach was evaluated through comparisons with in situ measurements. The explained variance is 0.838 with aroot-mean-squared-error (RMSE) of 2.912 hPa. The results indicated that the proposed method is an effective way to obtain SVP data at a regional scale.

Key words: Haihe river basin, surface vapor pressure, precipitable water vapor.