Daily Reservoir Evaporation Estimation Using MLP and ANFIS: A Comparative Study for Sustainable Water Management

Reservoir evaporation is a vital component of the hydrological cycle and presents considerable challenges for sustainable water management, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. This study assesses the effectiveness of two Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods: Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), a combination ANN with fuzzy logic, in estimating daily evaporation from a large reservoir in a semi-arid region. Using eight years of hydrometeorological data from a nearby station, the study employed the ReliefF algorithm as a feature selection method for relevant input variables. The dataset was divided into training, validation, and testing subsets with 5% and 10% validation ratios, using four train–test splits of 70:30, 75:25, 80:20, and 85:15. Various training algorithms (e.g., Levenberg–Marquardt) and membership functions (e.g., generalized bell-shaped functions) were tested for both models. MLP consistently outperformed ANFIS on the test sets, showing higher R2 and lower RMSE values. In the best-performing 70:30 split, MLP achieved an R2 of 0.8069 and RMSE of 0.0923, compared to ANFIS with an R2 of 0.3192 and RMSE of 0.2254. The findings highlight the AI-based approaches’ potential to support improved evaporation forecasting and integration into decision support tools for water resource planning amid changing climatic conditions.