%0 Journal Article %A Surinder Deswal and Mahesh Pal %D 2008 %J International Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering %B World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology %I Open Science Index 15, 2008 %T Artificial Neural Network based Modeling of Evaporation Losses in Reservoirs %U https://publications.waset.org/pdf/2045 %V 15 %X An Artificial Neural Network based modeling technique has been used to study the influence of different combinations of meteorological parameters on evaporation from a reservoir. The data set used is taken from an earlier reported study. Several input combination were tried so as to find out the importance of different input parameters in predicting the evaporation. The prediction accuracy of Artificial Neural Network has also been compared with the accuracy of linear regression for predicting evaporation. The comparison demonstrated superior performance of Artificial Neural Network over linear regression approach. The findings of the study also revealed the requirement of all input parameters considered together, instead of individual parameters taken one at a time as reported in earlier studies, in predicting the evaporation. The highest correlation coefficient (0.960) along with lowest root mean square error (0.865) was obtained with the input combination of air temperature, wind speed, sunshine hours and mean relative humidity. A graph between the actual and predicted values of evaporation suggests that most of the values lie within a scatter of ±15% with all input parameters. The findings of this study suggest the usefulness of ANN technique in predicting the evaporation losses from reservoirs. %P 18 - 22