Current World Environment

The process of evapotranspiration (ET) is a vital part of the water cycle. Exact estimation of the value of ET is necessary for designing irrigation systems and water resources management. Accurate estimation of ET is essential in agriculture, its over-estimation leads to cause the waste of valuable water resources and its underestimation leads to the plant moisture stress and decrease in the crop yield. The well known Penman-Monteith (PM) equation always performs the highest accuracy results of estimating reference Evapotranspiration (ET₀) among the existing methods is without any discussion. However, the equation requires climatic data that are not always available particularly for a developing country. ET₀ is a complex process which is depending on a number of interacting meteorological factors, such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, and radiation. The lack of physical understanding of ET₀ process and unavailability of all appropriate data results in imprecise estimation of ET₀. Over the past two decades, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been increasingly applied in modeling of hydrological processes because of their ability in mapping the input–output relationship without any understanding of physical process. This paper investigates for the first time in the semiarid environment of Junagadh, the potential of an artificial neural network (ANN) for estimating ET₀ with limited climatic data set.