Evapotranspiration and surface energy fluxes across Europe, Africa and Eastern South America throughout the operational life of the Meteosat second generation satellite

The exchange of energy and water fluxes between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere is crucial to a series of processes that impact human life. Noteworthy examples are agriculture yields, water availability, intensity and extent of droughts and the ability of ecosystems to provide services to society. The relevance of these processes has motivated the Satellite Application Facility on Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF) programme to set up an operational framework to estimate—among other variables—evapotranspiration (ET) and surface energy fluxes (SEF) on the basis of observations by the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite. The LSA SAF programme has recently launched the reprocessing of the ET and SEF datasets on the basis of the most recent version of the algorithm and homogenous forcing datasets. This article features the resulting ET/SEF dataset, a Data Record that encompasses the period from the start of the operational life of the MSG satellite (2004) till 2020 and covers the field of view of the MSG satellite (i.e. Europe, Africa and Eastern South America). Details on the algorithm and the datasets driving the ET/SEF estimates are also provided as well as a quality assessment.