Evapotranspiration Management

**77**

**Chapter 4**

**Abstract**

management.

**1. Introduction**

An Advanced Evapotranspiration

Estimating evapotranspiration is an important component in the monitoring of agricultural and environmental systems. This chapter will focus on the developing evapotranspiration method using general meteorological data and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The proposed model in this chapter will be refined by using both the complementary relationship and the Budyko framework. The relative evaporation parameter in the complementary relationship will be derived by using precipitation, potential evapotranspiration, and NDVI based on that the Budyko framework can support the complementary relationship. It is also important to determine whether the proposed model can compete and deliver accuracy similar to remote sending method in the aspect of application. The results in the first phase showed the proposed model could be a powerful methodology to estimate ET among the ground-based method. In the second phase, a nonlinear correction function was proposed to better describe the complementary relationship. We will also demonstrate that the use of ET is a better approach for drought estimations than considering reference ET. More importantly, the advantage of the proposed model is that it can comprehensively consider both effects of precipitation and vegetation information. Taken together,

this chapter has extended our knowledge of ET to support water resource

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), drought monitoring

**Keywords:** evapotranspiration, complementary relationship, Budyko framework,

Land surface evapotranspiration (ET) is an essential part of agricultural water management, and there are many classical methods including the Penman [1]. In the recent years, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) version of Penman-Monteith Equation [2] is widely used to estimate ET. However, this method is limited for hydrologic purpose. For example, meteorological data need to be measured at 2-m elevation, and the FAO method is mainly used to estimate crop ET from agricultural lands using crop coefficients which are derived from unlimited water conditions and specific times of the growing cycle. As an alternative, the complementary relationship (CR) developed by Bouchet [3] can be used to estimate ET using general meteorological data. This approach proposed the first complementary function of potential evapotranspiration (ETP) and wet environment evapotranspiration (ETW) for a

Method and Application

*Homin Kim and Jagath J. Kaluarachchi*

**Chapter 4**
