Estimation of Reference Evapotranspiration Using Artificial Neural Network Models and the Hybrid Wavelet Neural Network

Estimation of evapotranspiration is essential for planning, designing and managing irrigation and drainage schemes, as well as water resources management. In this research, artificial neural networks, neural network wavelet model, multivariate regression and Hargreaves' empirical method were used to estimate reference evapotranspiration in order to determine the best model in terms of efficiency with respect to the existing data. The daily data of two meteorological stations of Shahrekord and Farrokhshahr airport in the dry and cold zones of Shahrekord during the period 2013-2004 was used; these included the minimum and maximum temperature, the average nominal humidity, wind speed at 2 meters height and sunshine hours. %75 of the data were validated, and %25 of the data was used for testing the models. Designed network is a predictive neural network with an active sigmoid tangent function hidden in the layer. In the next step, different wavelets including Haar, db and Sym were applied on the data and the neural network-wavelet was designed. To evaluate the models, the method was used by the Penman-Montith Fao and for all four methods, RMSE, MAE and R statistical indices were calculated and ranked. The results showed that the wave-let- neural network with the db5 wavelet had a better performance than other wavelets, as well as the artificial neural network, multivariate regression and the Hargreaves method. The results of wavelet network modelling with the db5 wavelet in the Farrokhshahr station were calculated to be 0.2668, 0.2067 and 0.998, respectively; at the airport station, these were equal to 0.2138, 0.14 and 0.9989, respectively. The results, therefore, showed that the neural network-wavelet performance was more accurate than the other models studied in this study.