Decreases in ETp, ETpan, and ET0 have also been reported to be occurring simultaneously in China or some regions of China with increasing trends of air temperature during the past decades1213141516171819. Reduced wind speed and shortened sunshine duration are generally considered to be responsible for these phenomena9202122. However, some of conclusions drawn from previous studies on evapotranspiration trends are based on the time series data ended around 2000. Whether the deceasing trends in potential evaporation are still true when looking at the longer record with updated data should also be addressed. In addition, most studies mainly focus on the general trends without the consideration of the abrupt change in the temporal processes. Overall trend estimations may leave out detailed information and thus make these revealed changing patterns deviate from the real situation. Recently, contrary to the famous “evaporation paradox”, an increase in ETpan in China along with continuously rising temperature during the recent two decades was identified by Liu et al.23 with more recent observations. This phenomenon was further regionally verified in the hyper-arid region of Northwest of China by Li et al.24. Moreover, Wang et al.25 suggested that there was actually a zigzag increasing-decreasing-increasing pattern of regional average ET0 series with two joint points in 1973 and 1993 in the Tibetan Plateau. It is therefore worthwhile to re-examine the ET0 patterns in larger area with different climatic and geomorphologic conditions based on the updated data. However, nationwide investigation on the changing patterns of ET0 and its related trigger mechanism is not available.