Evaluating and Calibrating Reference Evapotranspiration Models Using Water Balance under Hyper-Arid Environment

This research investigates five reference evapotranspiration models (one combined model, one temperature-based model, and three radiation-based models) under hyper-arid environmental conditions at the operational field level. These models were evaluated and calibrated using the weekly water balance of alfalfa by EnviroSCAN to calculate crop evapotranspiration (ETc). Calibration models were evaluated and validated using wheat and potatoes, respectively, on the basis of weekly water balance. Based on the results and discussion, the FAO-56 Penman-Monteith model proved to be superior in estimating ETc with a slight underestimation of 2 %. Meanwhile, the Hargreaves-Samani (HS) model (temperature-based) underestimated ETc by 20 % and the Priestley-Taylor (PT) and Makkink (MK) models (radiation-based) had similar performances underestimating by up to 35 % of the measured ETc. The Turc (TR) model had the lowest performance compared with other models, demonstrating values underestimated by up to 60 % of the measured ETc. Local calibration based on alfalfa evapotranspiration measurements was used to rectify these underestimations. The surprisingly good performance of the calibrated simple HS model, with a new coefficient 0.0029, demonstrated its favorable potential to improve irrigation scheduling. The MK and PT models were in third and fourth rank, respectively, reflecting minor differences between one another. The new coefficients obtained for the MK and PT models were 1.99 and 0.963, respectively. One important observation was that the calibrated TR model performed poorly, with an increase in its coefficient from 0.013 to 0.034 to account for hyper-arid environmental conditions; moreover, it required additional seasonal calibration to adequately improve its performance.