estimation of evapotranspiration by remote sensing technique under different climate condition

abstract evapotranspiration (et) is one of the most important components of the water balance, it is also one of the most difficult to measure. despite the importance of et, methods to obtain values of et are still limited. conventional methods are very local, ranging from point to field scale. estimates of the et over the entire area, especially for irrigated areas, are essential, as these can differ substantially depending on the crop and the management applied. today, actual and potential evapotranspiration under different conditions can be estimated by using satellites and remote sensing (rs) techniques. so that in this research, recent twenty years metrological data was assessed and based on precipitation, temperature and wind speed, three period include drought, normal and wet years (2000, 1995 and 2007 respectively) was chosen. the actual and potential evapotranspiration was estimated from a time series of noaa-avhrr satellite images using the sebal (surface energy balance algorithm for land) algorithm in abshar irrigation system in esfahan during the three selected years. the results show that the maximum evapotranspiration (8.1 mm/day for eta and 9.5mm/day for etp) occurs in 2000 as a drought year. comparing the potential evapotranspiration results of sebal method with hargreaves and fao-56 penman-monteith methods show that, sebal method and conventional methods has the same results under current condition, so remote sensing techniques can estimated actual evapotranspiration and produce high spatial coverage of important terms in the water balance for large areas, but at the cost of a rather sparse temporal resolution. as water is highly manageable in irrigation systems, it is an application typically suitable to establish improvements in irrigation water management at large scale such as basin and irrigation systems.