Estimating Potential Evapotranspiration by Missing Temperature Data Reconstruction

This work studies the statistical characteristics of potential evapotranspiration calculations and their relevance within the water balance used to determine water availability in hydrological basins. The purpose of this study was as follows: first, to apply a missing data reconstruction scheme in weather stations of the Rio Queretaro basin; second, to reduce the generated uncertainty of temperature data: mean, minimum, and maximum values in the evapotranspiration calculation which has a paramount importance in the manner of obtaining the water balance at any hydrological basin. The reconstruction of missing data was carried out in three steps: (1) application of a 4-parameter sinusoidal type regression to temperature data, (2) linear regression to residuals to obtain a regional behavior, and (3) estimation of missing temperature values for a certain year and during a certain season within the basin under study; estimated and observed temperature values were compared. Finally, using the obtained temperature values, the methods of Hamon, Papadakis, Blaney and Criddle, Thornthwaite, and Hargreaves were employed to calculate potential evapotranspiration that was compared to the real observed values in weather stations. With the results obtained from the application of this procedure, the surface water balance was corrected for the case study.