Article
Irrigation Scheduling Tools: IrrigWise and IrrigWise-PRISM for Agricultural Crops and Urban Landscapes
6th Decennial National Irrigation Symposium
(2021)
Abstract
A web-based irrigation scheduling tool, IrrigWise, was developed for Texas to calculate plant irrigation requirements based on near-real-time site-specific rainfall, reference evapotranspiration, soil water content, and plant growth stage. It uses data from several databases, including USDA-NRCS’ Soil Survey Geographic Database, rainfall, and evapotranspiration from multiple weather networks across Texas, and forecasted weather data for five consecutive days from the National Weather Service. Weather stations are nonuniformly distributed across Texas; thus, in the absence of weather data, daily gridded weather data such as data generated by the Parameter elevation Regression on Independent Slopes Model, PRISM is used. This PRISM weather data, which is available at 30 arcsec (800 m) and 2.5 arcmin (4 km) resolutions was used as input for IrrigWise (IrrigWise-PRISM). IrrigWise-PRISM establishes irrigation scheduling programs for any crop or landscape grown at any location across the contiguous US and during any specific growing season. Both IrrigWise and Irrig-Wise-PRISM allow the users to select the appropriate crop and soil-related parameters of their interest. These two tools track the daily values of the water budget components of the field of interest, including irrigation amount and near-real-time weather data. In addition to providing information on when and for how long to irrigate, these tools also predict the root zone soil water content dynamics of the selected field for five consecutive days based on forecasted weather data and projected crop water uptakes. Wide use of these tools by the farming and urban communities could help improve irrigation management of crops and urban landscape in Texas and the contiguous US.
Keywords
- Irrigation scheduling,
- IrrigWise,
- IrrigWise-PRISM,
- Irrigation water use efficiency,
- Crops,
- Urban landscape
Disciplines
Publication Date
December 6, 2021
Citation Information
Ripendra Awal, Fares Ali and Hamideh Habibi. "Irrigation Scheduling Tools: IrrigWise and IrrigWise-PRISM for Agricultural Crops and Urban Landscapes" 6th Decennial National Irrigation Symposium (2021) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/ripendra-awal/41/