Comment on “Physical Interpretation of the Complementary Relationship for Evapotranspiration” by Sha Zhou and Bofu Yu, Published in Hydrology and Water Resources

Key Points

• The aim is to evaluate the complementary relationship (CR) evaporation model's performance in predicting latent energy (LE) fluxes.
• Tested CR model using routine meteorological data
• Compared results with eddy-covariance (EC) derived LE measurements from FLUXNET
• Globally calibrated the single-parameter thermodynamics-based CR models
• Thermodynamics-based CR versions showed significantly better performance than similarly calibrated models
• The findings challenge the physical interpretation of the processes involved in the original CR model