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Abstract Evapotranspiration is one of the basic components of the hydrologic cycle and essential for estimating irrigation water requirements. This paper investigates the modelling of evapotranspiration using the feed‐forward artificial neural network (ANN) technique with the Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) training algorithm. The LM algorithm has never been used in evapotranspiration estimation before. The LM is used for the optimization of network weights, since this algorithm is more powerful and faster than the conventional gradient descent. Various combinations of daily climatic data, i.e. wind speed, air temperature, relative humidity and solar radiation, from three stations in Los Angeles, USA, are used as inputs to the ANN so as to evaluate the degree of effect of each of these variables on evapotranspiration. A comparison is made between the estimates provided by the ANN and those of the following empirical models: Penman, Hargreaves, Turc. Mean square error, mean absolute error and determination coefficient statistics are used as comparing criteria for the evaluation of the models' performances. Based on the comparisons, it was found that the neural computing technique could be employed successfully in modelling evapotranspiration process from the available climatic data. The results also indicate that the Hargreaves method provides better performance than the Penman and Turc methods in estimation of the evapotranspiration. The accuracy of the ANN technique in evapotranspiration estimation using nearby station data was also investigated. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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