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Accurate estimation of evapotranspiration is generally constrained due to lack of required hydro-meteorological datasets. This study addresses the performance analysis of Reference Evapotranspiration (ETo) estimated from NASA/POWER, National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) global reanalysis data before and after dynamical downscaling through the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The state of the art Hamon's and Penman-Monteith methods were utilized for the ETo estimation in the Northern India. The performances indices such as Bias, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and correlation(r) were calculated, which showed the values 0.242, 0.422 and 0.959 for NCEP data (without downscaling)and 0.230, 0.402,0.969 for the downscaled data respectively. The results indicated that after WRF downscaling, there was some marginal improvement found in the ETo as compared to the without downscaling datasets. However, a better performance was found in the case of NASA/POWER datasets with Bias, RMSE and correlation values of 0.154 0.348 and 0.960 respectively. In overall, the results indicated that the NASA/POWER and WRF downscaled data can be used for ETo estimation, especially in the ungauged areas. However, NASA/POWER is recommended as the ETo calculations are less complicated than those required with NASA/POWER and WRF.

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