A Comparison of Different Evapotranspiration Methods and the Result Obtained Through Calculating the Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI) for the Tehran Province

Drought is one of the most common natural events that has a great negative impact on agriculture and water resources. Using the indices is necessary in order to monitor, evaluate and statistically analyze drought in each area. Recently, a powerful drought index, the Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI), is gaining wide acceptance mainly in the arid and semiarid climatic regions. Since RDI is based both on precipitation and potential evapotranspiration (PET), it is interesting to assess the effect of the PET calculation methods on the drought severity characterization obtained by the RDI. This paper compares the results of the RDI for various reference periods using some popular empirical PET methods with minimum data requirements. The selected methods are: Hargreaves-Samani, Thornthwaite, Blaney-Criddle, Jensen-Haise and FAO Penman-Monteith. The FAO Penman-Monteith method is used as reference method. The data used are from meteorological stations in thr Tehran Province representing different climatic conditions. No significant influence on RDI was detected by using the selected PET methods. However, the Blaney-Criddle method performed relatively better. This supports the conclusion that the RDI is a robust drought index not dependent upon the PET calculation methods.