Fuzzy Genetic Approach for Estimating Reference Evapotranspiration of Turkey: Mediterranean Region

The applicability of fuzzy genetic (FG) approach in modeling reference evapotranspiration (ET0) is investigated in this study. Daily solar radiation, air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed data of two stations, Isparta and Antalya, in Mediterranean region of Turkey, are used as inputs to the FG models to estimate ET0 obtained using the FAO-56 Penman–Monteith equation. The FG estimates are compared with those of the artificial neural networks (ANN). Root mean-squared error, mean absolute error and determination coefficient statistics were used as comparison criteria for the evaluation of the models’ accuracies. It was found that the FG models generally performed better than the ANN models in modeling ET0 of Mediterranean region of Turkey.