Monthly mean total class A pan evaporation for the Australian continent between 1976-2005. Class A pan evaporation is useful for estimating evaporation rates and water need and use. Modelled by fitting trivariate thin plate smoothing spline functions of longitude, latitude and vertically exaggerated elevation to the square roots of observed and estimated monthly 1976-2005 pan evaporation means at 444 Bureau of Meteorology stations. Quality controls were applied to the regression and the surface fitting processes to remove poor quality data. Thus, of 468 stations with at least 5 years of record, 19 stations had poor regressions with long term stations and a further 5 stations had extreme studentised residuals from initial spline analyses. Station elevations were 0.05 degree local averages of grid values from the GEODATA 9 second DEM version 3 as provided by eMAST_ANUClimate_fx_el05_v1m0. Missing monthly values were estimated by regression with the long term station that provided the monthly 1976-2005 means with with the least standard error. The mean absolute error of individual cross validation residuals provided by the spline analysis at 107 stations with near complete records, of at least 28 years, is 16.5 mm (11% of the mean).
Class A pan evaporation is useful for estimating evaporation rates and water need and use.
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