Comparison between methods of estimation of reference evapotranspiration in the municipality of São José dos Ausentes (RS), Brazil

ABSTRACT

Reference evapotranspiration is a very important component of the water balance and its estimation is essential for the execution of agricultural and environmental projects, for studies of water balance, irrigation projects and management, modeling of climatological processes and planning of water resources management. The Penman-Monteith method is considered by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as a standard for estimating reference evapotranspiration; however, due to the difficulty of obtaining a large number of meteorological variables that are employed in this method, several other methods have been used to estimate the reference evapotranspiration. The present coursework had the objective to compare the performance of the Thornthwaite, Hargraves-Samani, Makkink, Blaney-Criddle, Camargo, and Jensen-Haise methods for the municipality of São José dos Ausentes, using daily and monthly values estimated by the Penman-Monteith method. The data used to estimate the reference evapotranspiration were obtained through the Agritempo system, which stores and makes available the data of the automatic meteorological station of the National Meteorological Institute. The results show that the Blaney-Criddle method presented the best results, both daily and monthly, followed by the Jensen-Haise method in the monthly scale. On the other hand, the methods that presented the worst performances were those of Thorntwaite and Camargo, classified as “poor” on the monthly scale, and as “terrible” and “bad”, respectively, on the daily one.

Keywords:
Penman-Monteith; indirect methods; solar radiation