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Modelling hourly and daily open‐water evaporation rates in areas with an equatorial climate
Author(s) -
Tan Stephen Boon Kean,
Shuy Eng Ban,
Chua Lloyd Hock Chye
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
hydrological processes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.222
H-Index - 161
eISSN - 1099-1085
pISSN - 0885-6087
DOI - 10.1002/hyp.6251
Subject(s) - environmental science , temperate climate , evaporation , relative humidity , meteorology , pan evaporation , atmospheric sciences , humidity , climate change , wind speed , climate model , geography , ecology , geology , biology
Evaporation rate estimation is important for water resource studies. Previous studies have shown that the radiation‐based models, mass transfer models, temperature‐based models and artificial neural network (ANN) models generally perform well for areas with a temperate climate. This study evaluates the applicability of these models in estimating hourly and daily evaporation rates for an area with an equatorial climate. Unlike in temperate regions, solar radiation was found to correlate best with pan evaporation on both the hourly and daily time‐scales. Relative humidity becomes a significant factor on a daily time‐scale. Among the simplified models, only the radiation‐based models were found to be applicable for modelling the hourly and daily evaporations. ANN models are generally more accurate than the simplified models if an appropriate network architecture is selected and a sufficient number of data points are used for training the network. ANN modelling becomes more relevant when both the energy‐ and aerodynamics‐driven mechanisms dominate, as the radiation and the mass transfer models are incapable of producing reliable evaporation estimates under this circumstance. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.