The estimation of evapotranspiration by indirect methods provides synthetic data for planning irrigation systems and application on meteorological and hydrological models, both useful in watershed management. The objective of this study was to develop an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to estimate the reference evapotranspiration (Eto) based on daily air temperature data. The ANN model of Feedforward Multilayer Perceptron type, was trained using as a reference the daily Eto obtained by the Penman-Monteith method. In the intermediate and output layers were used activation functions like tan-sigmoid and linear, respectively. Eto values generated by ANN were compared with those obtained by the methods of Blanney-Criddle and Hargreaves considering the months of the four seasons. Comparing to the other analyzed methods, the results obtained from the ANN were closer to the standard Penman-Monteith method. Thus, the performance of the developed ANN was satisfactory, and the ANN model can be considered as one indirect method for estimating evapotranspiration and allows a cost reduction on data acquisition to estimate this variable.
intelligent systems; water balance; irrigation management
