Author(s)

Koffi Djaman^1*, Komlan Koudahe², Christopher Oluwakunmi Akinbile³, Suat Irmak⁴

¹Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, New Mexico State University, Agricultural Science Center at Farmington, Farmington, USA.
²ADA Consulting Africa, Lome, Togo.
³Department of Agricultural & Environmental Engineering, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria.
⁴Department of Biological Systems Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, USA.

The objectives of this study were to evaluate the performance of the FAO Penman Monteith reference evapotranspiration model under limited data and some mine temperature methods of reference evapotranspiration (ETo) under the semiarid and arid conditions in Mali. The results showed that under limited data conditions, the FAO-PM equation achieved accurate estimation of daily ETo when solar radiation, relative humidity, and wind speed are lacking individually with root mean squared errors (RMSE) averaging 0.52, 0.56 and 0.62 mm/day, respectively. Much more accurate ETo was estimated under relative humidity and wind speed missing data conditions with RMSE varying from 0.20 to 0.58 mm/day and average RE, MBE and MAE of 6.7%, -0.25 mm/day and 0.30 mm/day. The Jensen-Haise equation systematically overestimated ETo while the Hansen, Christiansen, and Irmak, and the two Tabari’s equations underestimated ETo at all weather stations. The Abtew equation showed the best performance among the selected ETo equations.

Reference Evapotranspiration, Semiarid and Arid Climate, Mali

Djaman, K. , Koudahe, K. , Akinbile, C. and Irmak, S. (2017) Evaluation of Eleven Reference Evapotranspiration Models in Semiarid Conditions. Journal of Water Resource and Protection, 9, 1469-1490. doi: 10.4236/jwarp.2017.912094.