Hourly air temperature driven using multi-layer perceptron and radial basis function networks in arid and semi-arid regions

This study employed two artificial neural network (ANN) models, including multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF), as data-driven methods of hourly air temperature at three meteorological stations in Fars province, Iran. MLP was optimized using the Levenberg–Marquardt (MLP_LM) training algorithm with a tangent sigmoid transfer function. Both time series (TS) and randomized (RZ) data were used for training and testing of ANNs. Daily maximum and minimum air temperatures (MM) and antecedent daily maximum and minimum air temperatures (AMM) constituted the input for ANNs. The ANN models were evaluated using the root mean square error (RMSE), the coefficient of determination (R ²) and the mean absolute error. The use of AMM led to a more accurate estimation of hourly temperature compared with the use of MM. The MLP-ANN seemed to have a higher estimation efficiency than the RBF ANN. Furthermore, the ANN testing using randomized data showed more accurate estimation. The RMSE values for MLP with RZ data using daily maximum and minimum air temperatures for testing phase were equal to 1.2°C, 1.8°C, and 1.7°C, respectively, at Arsanjan, Bajgah, and Kooshkak stations. The results of this study showed that hourly air temperature driven using ANNs (proposed models) had less error than the empirical equation.