Estimation of reference evapotranspiration using artificial neural network models for semi-arid region of Haryana

Abstract

The study was conducted to evaluate performance of artificial neural network (ANN) models for estimating reference evapotranspiration (ET0 ) for semi-arid region of Haryana state. Ten years (2011-2020) daily weather data of maximum and minimum temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and sun shine hours was collected from the meteorological observatory at CCS HAU, Hisar. Multilayer perceptron feed forward back propagation ANN models were evaluated for different training algorithms (10), number of hidden layers (1-3) and number of neurons in hidden layers (1-30). Training algorithms compared in the study were heuristic techniques (GDA, GDX, RP), conjugate gradient (CGF, CGP, CGB, SCG), quasi-Newton (BFG, OSS) and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM). Results were compared against standard FAO Penman-Monteith method. The study revealed that best performance for ANN was found with LM algorithm in single layer of 13 neurons exhibiting RMSE, R, ME and RPD values 0.306, 0.986, 0.976 and 6.63, respectively. ANN models showed good performance in prediction of reference evapotranspiration.