Modeling Evapotranspiration Response to Climatic Forcings Using Data-Driven Techniques in Grassland Ecosystems

Remarkable progress has been made over the last decade toward characterizing the mechanisms that dominate the exchange of water vapor between the biosphere and the atmosphere. This is attributed partly to the considerable development of machine learning techniques that allow the scientific community to use these advanced tools for approximating the nonlinear processes affecting the variation of water vapor in terrestrial ecosystems. Three novel machine learning approaches, namely, group method of data handling, extreme learning machine (ELM), and adaptive neurofuzzy inference system (ANFIS), were developed to simulate and forecast the daily evapotranspiration (ET) at four different grassland sites based on the flux tower data using the eddy covariance method. These models were compared with the extensively utilized data-driven models, including artificial neural network, generalized regression neural network, and support vector machine (SVM). Moreover, the influences of internal functions on their corresponding models (SVM, ELM, and ANFIS) were investigated together. It was demonstrated that most developed models did good job of simulating and forecasting daily ET at the four sites. In addition to strengths of robustness and simplicity, the newly proposed methods achieved the estimates comparable to those of the conventional approaches and accordingly can be used as promising alternatives to traditional methods. It was further discovered that the generalization performance of the ELM, ANFIS, and SVM models strongly depended on their respective internal functions, especially for SVM.