A mass transfer evaporation model is proposed that uses MODIS water
surface temperature data and land-based meteorological data, and
employs a new approach to calibrate the transfer coefficient via
closure of the long-term energy budget of the lake. Some of the
longstanding issues of developing and applying lake evaporation
models are reviewed, including the adequacy of using land-based
meteorological data, the difficulty of applying transfer
coefficients with fixed values calibrated elsewhere, and the need to
estimate rates of change of stored enthalpy when the model involves
energy budget concepts. Publicly available data from a 5-year
measurement campaign at Lake Mead allow to quantify the effect of
using land-based data, and subsequently to test the proposed
model. We show that atmospheric stability effects are very
important, and that their incorporation by means of existing
stability functions in the literature produces good
results with a one-parameter model that can be locally calibrated
with the same input data used by the model, without the need of
local evaporation measurements. The model is simple in its structure
and data requirements, and can be widely applied.