Acknowledgements:
Thank you to all of the authors in which we sourced data for validation. We would like to thank FAO who funded the operational methodology for an open-access database to monitor land and water productivity (WaPOR portal) and the FRAME consortium, in particular eLEAF and VITOas the primary producers of the WaPOR datasets. We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Michaiki Sugita for providing the EG-ZAN, EG-SAA and EG-SAB EC data. We thank and acknowledge the efforts of researchers at the Fluxnet, AMMACATCH and KWSTI flux tower sites and thank them for making their data available. We thank the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for making their observed Q data available and the NASA/EOS MODIS evapotranspiration team for the MOD16 global evapotranspiration product. We would also like to thank Karin M. Viergever for being our key correspondence with the data provider.