Intercomparison of freshwater fluxes over ocean and investigations into water budget closure

The development of algorithms for the retrieval of water cycle components from satellite data - such as total column water vapor content (TCWV), precipitation (P), latent heat flux, and evaporation (E) - has seen much progress in the past 3 decades. In the present study, we compare six recent satellite-based retrieval algorithms and ERA5 (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' fifth reanalysis) freshwater flux (E-P) data regarding global and regional, seasonal and interannual variation to assess the degree of correspondence among them. The compared data sets are recent, freely available, and documented climate data records (CDRs), developed with a focus on stability and homogeneity of the time series, as opposed to instantaneous accuracy.