evapotranspiration

The transfer of water vapor to the atmosphere from soil with vegetation, due both to the direct evaporation of the water present on that surface and to the transpiration of plants. Estimating it is not straightforward, and there are different formulas for calculating it. In 1948, the American climatologist Charles Warren Thornthwaite (1899-1963) proposed one of the most widely used ones since then, and introduced the concept of potential evapotranspiration (PET), which is that which would occur under optimal conditions, as opposed to actual ones.