Modeling and Estimating Daily Reference Evapotranspiration Using Soft Computing Models (Case Study: Aligudarz Station)

Calculation and estimation of evapotranspiration is one of the most important parameters of water management in agricultural engineering projects. The aim of this study was to evaluate the models of gene expression programming (GEP), group method of data handling (GMDH), and Multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) to estimating daily reference evapotranspiration. For this purpose, daily data recorded during the last 25-year period (1993-2017) of Aligudarz region (located in the east of Lorestan province) were used. 80% of the data were used for training and the remaining 20% for testing the models. The modeling results showed that only with the maximum temperature and average wind speed can evapotranspiration be estimated with very good accuracy. The error indices of GEP model in testing stage are , the error indices of MARS and GMDH models are .  Comparing the performance of the models showed that the March model performed better than the other models.