Application of Soft Computing Model for Hydrologic Forecasting

Accurate forecasting of pan evaporation (PE) is very important for monitoring, survey, and management of water resources. The purpose of this study is to develop and apply Kohonen self-organizing feature maps neural networks model (KSOFM-NNM) to forecast the daily PE for the dry climate region in south western Iran. KSOFM-NNM for Ahwaz station was used to forecast daily PE on the basis of temperature-based, radiation-based, and sunshine duration-based input combinations. The measurements at Ahwaz station in south western Iran, for the period of January 2002 - December 2008, were used for training, cross-validation and testing data of KSOFM-NNM. The results obtained by TEM 1 produced the best results among other combinations for Ahwaz station. Based on the comparisons, it was found that KSOFM-NNM can be employed successfully for forecasting the daily PE from the limited climatic data in south western Iran.