Abstract
Accurate estimation of the reference evapotranspiration (ET0) is important for the water resource planning and scheduling of irrigation systems. For this purpose, the radial basis function network with particle swarm optimization (RBFN-PSO) and radial basis function network with back propagation (RBFN-BP) were used in this investigation. The FAO-56 Penman-Monteith equation was used as reference equation to estimate ET0 for Serbia during the period of 1980-2010. The obtained simulation results confirmed the proposed models and were analyzed using the root mean-square error (RMSE), the mean absolute error (MAE), and the coefficient of determination (R (2)). The analysis showed that the RBFN-PSO had better statistical characteristics than RBFN-BP and can be helpful for the ET0 estimation.