The first step, the calculation of the PET, is difficult because of the involvement of numerous parameters, including surface temperature, air humidity, soil incoming radiation, water vapor pressure, and ground–atmosphere latent and sensible heat fluxes (Allen et al. 1998). Different methods have been proposed to indirectly estimate the PET from meteorological parameters measured at weather stations. According to data availability, such methods include physically based methods (e.g., the Penman–Monteith method; PM) and models based on empirical relationships, where PET is calculated with fewer data requirements. The PM method has been adopted by the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as the standard procedure for computing PET. The PM method requires large amounts of data because its calculation involves values for solar radiation, temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity. In the majority of regions of the world, these meteorological data are not available. Accordingly, alternative empirical equations have been proposed for PET calculation where data are scarce (Allen et al. 1998). Although some methods in general provide better results than others for PET quantification (Droogers and Allen 2002), the purpose of including PET in the drought index calculation is to obtain a relative temporal estimation, and therefore the method used to calculate the PET is not critical. Mavromatis (2007) recently showed that the use of simple or complex methods to calculate the PET provides similar results when a drought index, such as the PDSI, is calculated. Therefore, we followed the simplest approach to calculate PET (Thornthwaite 1948), which has the advantage of only requiring data on monthly-mean temperature. Following this method, the monthly PET (mm) is obtained by