Study of different climatic conditions to assess the role of solar radiation in reference crop evapotranspiration equations

This study aims to assess radiation-based models versus the FAO Penman–Monteith (FPM) model to determine the best model using linear regression under different weather conditions. The reference evapotranspiration was estimated using 22 radiation-based methods and was compared with the FPM. The results showed that the Stephens method estimates the reference evapotranspiration better than other methods in the most provinces of Iran (nine provinces). However, the values of R² were more than 0.9930 for 24 provinces of Iran. The radiation-based methods estimated the reference evapotranspiration near the Caspian Sea better than other regions. The most precise methods were the Berengena–Gavilan, Modified Priestley–Taylor, and Priestley–Taylor methods for the provinces ES (center of Iran), GI and GO (north of Iran) and the Stephens–Stewart method for IL (west of Iran). Finally, a list of the best performance of each method has been presented to use other regions and next research steps according to the values of mean, maximum, and minimum temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, elevation, sunshine, and wind speed. The best weather conditions to use radiation-based equations are 23.6–24.6 MJ m^?2 day^?1, 12–20°C, 18–24°C, 5–13°C, and <180 hour month^?1 for solar radiation, mean, maximum, and minimum temperature, and sunshine, respectively.