Estimates of reference evapotranspiration in the municipality of Ariquemes (RO) using neural networks GMDH-type

Abstract

Reference evapotranspiration is a climatological variable of great importance for water use dimensioning in irrigation methods. In order to contribute to the climatic understanding of Ariquemes, Rodônia state, Brazil, the study aims to model the behavior of the time series of reference evapotranspiration using a GMDH-type (Group Method of Data Handling) artificial neural network (ANN) and to compare it with the SARIMA (Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) methodology. Data from the National Institute of Meteorology -INMET, obtained at the Automatic Weather Station of Ariquemes, from January 2011 to January 2014, were used. Data analysis was performed using software R version 3.3.1 through the GMDH-type ANN package. Modeling by GMDH-type ANN led to results similar to the results of the SARIMA model, thus constituting an option to predict climatic time series. GMDH-type models with larger numbers of inputs and layers presented lowest mean square error.