Worldwide assessment of the Penman–Monteith temperature approach for the estimation of monthly reference evapotranspiration

When not all the meteorological data needed for estimating reference evapotranspiration ETo are available, a Penman–Monteith temperature (PMT) equation can be adopted using only measured maximum and minimum air temperature data. The performance of the PMT method is evaluated and compared with the Hargreaves–Samani (HS) equation using the measured long-term monthly data of the FAO global climatic dataset New LocClim. The objective is to evaluate the quality of the PMT method for different climates as represented by the Köppen classification calculated on a monthly time scale. Estimated PMT and HS values are compared with FAO-56 Penman–Monteith ETo values through several statistical performance indices. For the full dataset, the approximated PMT expressions using air temperature alone produce better results than the uncalibrated HS method, and the performance of the PMT method is even more improved adopting corrections depending on the climate class for the estimation of the solar radiation, especially in the tropical climate class.