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Evaporation is an essential link between surface energy balance and water balance, and high-cold regions are sensitive to climate change. However, there is a large amount of uncertainty in the evaporation prediction process in the high-cold areas, which poses severe challenges to scientifically analyzing the hydrological cycle changes and water resources management in river basins. Therefore, taking the source area of the Yellow River in the “high-cold region” as an example, this paper used five evaporation calculation models with different physical mechanisms (P-M, Har, J-H, Mak and P-T) to clarify the impact of model uncertainty on the prediction of potential evaporation in the basin. Secondly, by coupling the “evaporation calculation model, GCMs and RCPs” model, the impact of various uncertainties on the uncertainty of potential evaporation prediction in different future periods (short-term, medium-term, and long-term) was explored. The contribution of their independent and interactive effects to the uncertainty of potential evaporation prediction was separated using the variance analysis method. The results show that the potential evaporation model based on solar radiation and temperature is significantly greater than the potential evaporation model based on physical mechanism, and its annual potential evaporation difference is about 150 mm. The uncertainty of RCPs is the main factor leading to the uncertainty of evaporation prediction, accounting for about 65%, and the contribution of the interaction between multiple uncertainty sources to the uncertainty of evaporation prediction is particularly prominent in the “spring and winter” seasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]