The change in weather conditions has caused great concern in the world and the major issue, in this context, is the global warming. The changes in climate may affect the water demand of plants, because the evapotranspiration is affected by changes in climatic elements. The objective of this study was to examine the possible effects of climatological changes in evapotranspiration and reference evapotranspiration of corn in Viçosa - MG, Brazil. Trend analysis by the Mann-Kendall statistic and student t test of the linear regression were used to study the behavior of the following weather elements: maximum and minimum temperatures, sunshine duration, wind speed and relative humidity. It was observed a reduction in the reference evapotranspiration and maize crop evapotranspiration over the recent past 41 years, mainly because of reduced solar radiation and wind speed. The reference evapotranspiration showed reductions of 4.2 mm per year.
maize evapotranspiration; trend; climate change
