Three methods including the Penman-Monteith (PM), Priestley-Taylor (PT), and 1963 Penman equation (PE) for calculating daily reference evapotranspiration (ETo) were evaluated in the Maritime region of Canada with the data collected from 2004 to 2007. An automatically operated meteorological station located on the Potato Research Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, was used to collect required meteorological data for evapotranspiration modeling. A Bowen Ratio system (BR) was setup near the Environment Canada grade one weather station to provide evapotranspiration observations for the validation research of reference evapotranspiration models. The results showed that the prediction from each of the tested models had a certain degree of offset in comparison with the observations obtained by the BR method. All of the tested models slightly overestimated evapotranspiration compared to the BR system by 5-14%, depending on the method. However, the PM generated a better fit to the pooled dataset while the PT produced the best prediction for the 2007 validation dataset. The PM generated the best estimation of evapotranspiration for year 2004 during a inter-annual comparison. The BR revealed that the average daytime ET for the site was around 2.5 mm day-1(±0.1) averaged for Julian day 157-276 in 2004 to 2006 and possible condensation was 0.16 mm day-1 for the same period. Crop coefficient (Kc) varied with different models, for example, 0.42 for the PM, 0.44 for the PT, and 0.67 for the PE with a slight yearly variation. With this set of Kc values, a validation with additional dataset collected in 2007 indicated that all three equations achieved a good fit with observations using the above Kc values. The PT performed slightly better than the other two models. A single factor analysis did not show any statistically significant difference between predicted and measured ET. With a consideration of simplicity and application for scaling up to landscape, this research suggested that the PT is the preferable method for estimating ET values in this region.
Keywords: 1963 Penman Equation; Bowen Ratio; Penman-Monteith; Priestley-Taylor; crop coefficient (Kc); evapotranspiration model.