Designing Potential Evaporation Evaluation Software Linkable to NASA POWER Database and Capable of Feasibility Assessment of Evaporation Reduction due to Photovoltaic Panels over Water Bodies

Online evaluation of potential evaporation can be useful in water resources management. In this research, the use of software for smartphones to estimate the potential evaporation from free water surface and ground surface and also to estimate the possibility of reducing evaporation due to the installation of photovoltaic panels on water bodies is considered. The data used is extracted from the NASA-POWER cloud network database and the software intelligently detects the selected point in relation to two states of dry area or water area and performs the relevant calculations. The proposed relation for the evaluation of potential evaporation was analyzed by considering 10 year average data of Doosti dam (2008–2017) and its error rate and some experimental relation of potential evaporation and evaporation from the free water surface with the rate of evaporation from the evaporation pan located at the site were determined. The results indicated that the proposed relation yielded a smaller error compared with all the other relations. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed relation and the data extracted from the NASA POWER database, the evaluations done by the software were compared against the values from the evaporation pans in the synoptic stations in six cities. This revealed the validity of the software outputs to be within 8–16%.