Actual evapotranspiration is an important parameter in crop yield models, soil moisture determination and crop stress detection. As actual evapotranspiration is not routinely available, maximum evapotranspiration (ETJ is normally used in agronomic models to calculate watering needs over irrigated areas. For this reason an empirical method has been developed to obtain ETra from albedo and temperature data suplied by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor on board NOAA satellites. This model has been applied to the La Mancha region, Spain, where barley, vine and maize are the main crops, and ETM was obtained with an acceptable error of ± 1-4 mm of water per day.