A 5-km gridded runoff and evapotranspiration products of the Tibetan Plateau

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is the origin of a dozen major Asian rivers nurturing billions of people in the adjacent lowlands. With the rapid regional warming, the cryosphere melting of the TP has intensified, resulting in significant changes in basin-scale hydrological processes. Therefore, a high-quality and continuous TP runoff and evapotranspiration product is crucial for improving scientific understanding of the water cycle, and for water resources management and sustainable development under ongoing changing environments. In this study, a 5-km monthly gridded runoff and evapotranspiration product (unit:mm) in 1998-2017 was generated across the headwaters of seven major TP rivers (the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Indus). This was achieved using an observation-constrained distributed cryosphere-hydrology model, known as the WEB-DHM. And the WEB-DHM model performs well in all headwaters through comparing to streamflow observations.