Journal article
Estimating actual, potential, reference crop and pan evaporation using standard meteorological data: A pragmatic synthesis
TA McMahon, MC Peel, L Lowe, R Srikanthan, TR McVicar
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences | COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH | Published : 2013
Open access
Abstract
This guide to estimating daily and monthly actual, potential, reference crop and pan evaporation covers topics that are of interest to researchers, consulting hydrologists and practicing engineers. Topics include estimating actual evaporation from deep lakes and from farm dams and for catchment water balance studies, estimating potential evaporation as input to rainfall-runoff models, and reference crop evapotranspiration for small irrigation areas, and for irrigation within large irrigation districts. Inspiration for this guide arose in response to the authors' experiences in reviewing research papers and consulting reports where estimation of the actual evaporation component in catchment a..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council, Melbourne Water and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Funding Acknowledgements
This research was partially funded by the Australian Research Council project ARC LP100100756, Melbourne Water and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The authors are grateful to their colleagues especially Randall Donohue, Biju George, Hector Malano, Tim Peterson, Q.-J. Wang and Andrew Western for their support of the project through discussion of many practical issues, to Francis Chiew, Mike Hobbins, Roger Jones and Lu Zhang for access to a range of computer programs and manuals dealing with Morton's models, and to Fiona Johnson for providing detailed computations of PenPan which allowed us to independently check our own computations. Clarification of past research by Wilfried Brutsaert, Joe Landsberg, David McJannet, Mike Raupach, Jozsef Szilagyi and Jim Wallace is gratefully acknowledged. Lake temperature data were provided by Kim Seong Tan of Melbourne Water Corporation. The AWS climate data were provided by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, National Climate Centre. We thank S. J. Schymanski, J. Szilagyi, J. Dracup and an anonymous referee for comments that helped us improve our paper.