In order to improve the robustness and internal consistency of evapotranspiration estimation in arid regions and to reveal the characteristics of water consumption structure within a river basin, this study focused on the Aksu River Basin. Multiple data sources, including the Penman–Monteith model, MODIS remote sensing products, GRACE terrestrial water storage change data, and the GLDAS–Noah model, were integrated to establish a Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA)-based framework for fusing actual evapotranspiration (ETa) estimates. The results indicate that the BMA integration effectively mitigated model-dependent biases and improved the consistency and robustness of basin-scale ETa estimates. During the period 2000–2020, ETa in the basin exhibited an overall increasing trend (approximately 4.04 mm/a), with a spatial distribution pattern characterized by higher values in the northwest and lower values in the southeast. In terms of water consumption effectiveness, low-effectiveness water consumption predominated in the basin (accounting for 61.24%), while high-effectiveness water consumption accounted for a relatively smaller proportion (26.01%). These results suggest that the current water consumption structure remains dominated by low-effectiveness components, indicating potential room for optimization in balancing irrigation activities and ecosystem water use. The multi-source data fusion and water consumption effectiveness evaluation framework proposed in this study provides a scientific basis for water resource management and ecological water security assessment in arid river basins.
Yang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.