Estimating and forecasting daily reference crop evapotranspiration in China with temperature-driven deep learning models

Accurately estimating and forecasting short-term daily reference crop evapotranspiration (ET o ) is crucial for real-time irrigation decision-making and regional agricultural water management. Although the Penman-Monteith formula shows high accuracy, the requirement for excessive meteorological factors by this formula restricts its practical application. Previous studies have developed many ET o estimation models using deep learning (DL) algorithm, which only require temperature data as input. Subsequently, temperature forecast data is used to drive these models for ET o forecasting. However, these models are often limited to the specific locations of their training sets due to significant climatic variations across regions. Besides, weather forecasts at different lead days typically exhibit different biases. It remains unclear whether train ET o forecasting models for different lead times will enhance the overall forecasting accuracy. Hence, in this study, we innovatively utilized an extensive array of weather forecast data to develop customized ET o forecasting models for each day of the next 15 days, while incorporating both location and seasonal features into the model training procedure. Five deep learning (DL) models were employed in this study, namely Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Convolutional Neural Networks Bi-LSTM (CNN-BiLSTM), and CNN-BiLSTM-Attention. The results revealed that the differences in the performance of estimating ET o among the DL models were less pronounced compared to the variations that existed between diverse training strategies. By integrating location and seasonality information into the training set, we found a notable improvement in the accuracy of ET o estimating, with the average Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of the five DL models decreasing from 0.55 mm d −1 to 0.48 mm d −1 . Furthermore, when we directly employed a larger volume of weather forecast data to train the models, the forecasting accuracy of ET o was significantly improved, and among the five DL models, GRU performs the best. Specifically, the RMSE values for the ET o forecasts made by GRU model for the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 15th days in the future have decreased from 0.70, 0.87, 1.00 and 1.33 mm d −1 to 0.51, 0.56, 0.61 and 0.67 mm d −1 , respectively. Additionally, compared to previous studies, we have successfully extended the lead time of ET o forecasts from 7 days to 15 days. These results indicate that the ET o estimating and forecasting models developed in this study demonstrate strong applicability across the entire country, which can provide effective support for irrigation water resource management. • Massive temperature forecast data were directly used in ET o forecasting. • Location and seasonal information were included in the training set. • Over 400 independent stations were used to test the accuracy of the model. • The model is applicable to main agricultural production regions across China. • The RMSE of the forecasted ET o with a lead time of 15 days is 0.67 mm d −1 .