Estimating Reference Evapotranspiration Using Limited Weather Data
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 135, Issue 4
Abstract
The FAO-56 Penman-Monteith combination equation (FAO-56 PM) has been recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as the standard equation for estimating reference evapotranspiration . The FAO-56 PM equation requires the numerous weather data that are not available in the most of the stations. This paper examines the potential of FAO-56 PM equation in estimating the under humid conditions from limited weather data. For this study, full weather data sets were collected from six humid weather stations from Serbia, South East Europe. FAO-56 reduced-set PM estimates were in closest agreement with FAO-56 full set PM estimates at the most of locations. The difference between FAO-56 full set PM estimates and FAO-56 PM reduced-set estimates generally increases by increasing the number of estimated weather parameters. Overall results indicate that FAO-56 reduced-set PM approaches mostly provided better results compared to Turc equation, adjusted Hargreaves equation and temperature-based RBF network. This fact strongly supports using the FAO-56 PM equation even in the absence of the complete weather data set. The minimum and maximum air temperature data and local default wind speed value are the minimum data requirements necessary to successfully use the FAO-56 PM equation under humid conditions.
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Information
Published In
Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 135 • Issue 4 • August 2009
Pages: 443 - 449
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Dec 27, 2007
Accepted: Nov 3, 2008
Published online: Jul 15, 2009
Published in print: Aug 2009
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