Combination of satellite imagery with meteorological data for estimating reference evapotranspiration

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in its publication No. 56 of the Irrigation and Drainage Series presents the FAO Penman-Monteith procedure for the estimation of reference evapotranspiration from meteorological data, however, its calculation may be complicated in areas where there are no weather stations. This paper presents an evaluation of the potential of the Land Surface Temperature and Digital Elevation Models products derived from the MODIS and ASTER sensors, both on board the Terra EOS AM-1 satellite, for the estimation of reference evapotranspiration using the Penman-Monteith FAO-56, Hargreaves, Thornthwaite and Blaney-Criddle models. The four models were compared with the method proposed by FAO calculated with the observed data of a ground based meteorological station, finding a significant relation with the models Penman-Monteith FAO-56 and Hargreaves.