Modeling urban evapotranspiration using remote sensing, flux footprints, and artificial intelligence.

As climate change progresses, urban areas are increasingly affected by water scarcity and the urban heat island effect. Evapotranspiration (ET) is a crucial component of urban greening initiatives of cities worldwide aimed at mitigating these issues. However, ET estimation methods in urban areas have so far been limited. An expanding number of flux towers in urban environments provide the opportunity to directly measure ET by the eddy covariance method. In this study, we present a novel approach to model urban ET by combining flux footprint modeling, remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) data, and deep learning and machine learning techniques. This approach facilitates spatio-temporal extrapolation of ET at a half-hourly resolution; we tested this approach with a two-year dataset from two flux towers in Berlin, Germany. The benefit of integrating remote sensing and GIS data into models was investigated by testing four predictor scenarios. Two algorithms (1D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and random forest (RF)) were compared. The best-performing models were then used to model ET values for the year 2019. The inclusion of GIS data extracted using flux footprints enhanced the predictive accuracy of models, particularly when meteorological data was more limited. The best-performing scenario (meteorological and GIS data) showed an RMSE of 0.0239 mm/h and R

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.