Evaluation of six empirical evapotranspiration equations - case study: Campos dos Goytacazes/RJ

• Autor(a) principal: Fernandes,Lázaro Costa
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Outros Autores: Paiva,Célia Maria, Rotunno Filho,Otto Corrêa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-77862012000300002
• topic: evapotranspiration; FAO56-Penman-Monteith; empirical equations

The evapotranspiration is a component of the water balance constituting a major challenge in its quantification. The complex physical processes involved in its effective determination on a large scale have spurred scientists to often make use of empirical equations, which have inherent limitations with regard to their applicability as descriptors of the evapotranspiration behavior in different regions across the world. This study was performed for the Campos dos Goytacazes region, in Rio de Janeiro state. It is proposed to investigate and to evaluate the performance of six empirical equations in contrast to FAO56-Penman-Monteith equation. The results indicated that the differences observed between the values obtained using the empirical models applied in this study and the values calculated by the FAO56-Penman-Monteith equation were greater than 10%, which means an error of about 0.5 mm.day-1.