Abstract

Study region Nile Basin, Africa. Study focus The accurate representation of precipitation (P) and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) patterns is crucial for water resources management, yet there remains a high spatial and temporal variability among gridded products, particularly over data-scarce regions. We evaluated the performance of eleven state-of-the-art products and seven ETa products over the Nile Basin using a four-step procedure: (i) products were evaluated at the monthly scale through a point-to-pixel approach; (ii) streamflow was modelled using the Random Forest machine learning technique, and simulated for well-performing catchments for 2009–2018 (to correspond with ETa product availability); (iii) ETa products were evaluated at the multiannual scale using the water balance method; and (iv) the ability of the best-performing and ETa products to represent monthly variations in terrestrial water storage (TWS) was assessed through a comparison with GRACE Level-3 data. New hydrological insights for the region CHIRPSv2 was the best-performing product (median monthly KGE’ of 0.80) and PMLv2 and WaPORv2.1 the best-performing ETa products over the majority of the evaluated catchments. The application of the water balance using these best-performing products captures the seasonality of TWS well over the White Nile Basin, but overestimates seasonality over the Blue Nile Basin. Our study demonstrates how gridded and ETa products can be evaluated over extremely data-scarce conditions using an easily transferable methodology.