Estimation of Reference Evapotranspiration of Nagpur Region Using Simplified Approach

For water resources project planning and irrigation scheduling, estimation of reference evapotranspiration is necessary. A common method to estimate reference evapotranspiration is to use pan evaporation data and convert it using a pan coefficient. For Nagpur region (Maharashtra, India), meteorological data was collected which included upwind fetch, wind speed and relative humidity at the pan site. Reference evapotranspiration is calculated using pan evaporation method based on simplified model proposed by Snyder et al. (2005) and also by using four conventional methods, based on the average monthly values of the meteorological parameters. A comparison of results obtained by all the five methods is presented in this paper.