Dear all,

I have downloaded daily ERA5 potential evaporation (evp) data from 1981 to 2016.
The bounding box is longitude -58.0 to -73.0 and latitude -8.0 to -21.0.
This region is Madeira River Catchment in Amazon.
From ERA5 documentation units are in meter and and its convertion to mm was done by multiplying it to 1000.
The same procedure was done to precipitation data.
Attached one plot of both time series of monthly accumulated of precipitation and potential evaporation.
As one can notice potential evaporation (ranging from 3 to 6 mm) is much lower than precipitation (ranging from 0 to 400 mm).
According to Maeda (2017) mean annual rainfall is 1716 mm year−1 and mean annual actual evapotranspiration is 1132 mm year−1 for Madeira.

Would you have any clue for this?
Best regards

References:
Maeda, E. E., Ma, X., Wagner, F. H., Kim, H., Oki, T., Eamus, D., & Huete, A. (2017). Evapotranspiration seasonality across the Amazon Basin. Earth System Dynamics.