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Reference evapotranspiration (ET0) is a key component in efficient water management, especially in arid and semi-arid environments. However, accurate ET0 assessment at the regional scale is complicated by the limited number of weather stations and the strict requirements in terms of their location and surrounding physical conditions for the collection of valid weather data. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, new approaches based on the use of remote sensing techniques and weather forecast tools have been proposed.

Use of the Land Surface Analysis Satellite Application Facility (LSA SAF) tool and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have allowed the design and development of innovative approaches for ET0 assessment, which are especially useful for areas lacking available weather data from weather stations. Thus, by identifying the best-performing interpolation approaches (such as the Thin Plate Splines, TPS) and by developing new approaches (such as the use of data from the most similar weather station, TS, or spatially distributed correction factors, CITS), errors as low as 1.1% were achieved for ET0 assessment. Spatial and temporal analyses reveal that the generated errors were smaller during spring and summer as well as in homogenous topographic areas.

The proposed approaches not only enabled accurate calculations of seasonal and daily ET0 values, but also contributed to the development of a useful methodology for evaluating the optimum number of weather stations to be integrated into a weather station network and the appropriateness of their locations. In addition to ET0, other variables included in weather forecast datasets (such as temperature or rainfall) could be evaluated using the same innovative methodology proposed in this study. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.