Daily reference evapotranspiration prediction for irrigation scheduling decisions based on the hybrid PSO-LSTM model

The shortage of available water resources and climate change are major factors affecting agricultural irrigation. In order to improve the irrigation water use efficiency, it is necessary to predict the water requirements for crops in advance. Reference evapotranspiration (ET(o)) is a hypothetical standard reference crop evapotranspiration, many types of artificial intelligence models have been applied to predict ET(o); However, there are still few in the literature regarding the application of hybrid models for deep learning model parameters optimization. This paper proposes two hybrid models based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) and long-short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, used to predict ET(o) at the four climate stations, Shaanxi province, China. These two hybrid models were trained using 40 years of historical data, and the PSO was used to optimize the hyperparameters in the LSTM network. We applied the optimized model to predict the daily ET(o) in 2019 under different datasets, the result showed that the optimized model has good prediction accuracy. The optimized hybrid models can help farmers and irrigation planners to make plan earlier and precisely, and can provide valuable information to improve tasks such as irrigation planning.