The article How well do gridded precipitation and actual evapotranspiration products represent the key water balance components in the Nile Basin? has been published on the Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies journal.

This article evaluates the performance of eleven state-of-the-art precipitation (P) products and seven actual evapotranspiration (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.

The application of the water balance using the 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.