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Water demand at a basin level is influenced by many factors such meteorological variables, soil moisture, vegetation type and irrigation system. Among them, climate is the major driver, because weather conditions determine energy balances and vapor pressure deficits that affect the magnitudes of vapor flux from surface to atmosphere. Monitoring evaporation is a great challenge since specific and costly equipments are required. As an alternative, agronomists and engineers use semi-empirical equations such as the Penman–Monteith formula to estimate potential evapotranspiration based on surface weather observations. Unfortunately weather stations are scarce and do not always have the instrumentation to measure relevant variables for its calculation. In this work, we evaluate the use of numerical weather forecasts, obtained from MM5 model, as proxy for surface meteorological data with the specific objective …