Forecasting Crop Irrigation Water Requirements

Project ID: 1472
Principal Investigator: Subhrendu Gangopadhyay
Research Topic: Water Operation Models and Decision Support Systems
Funded Fiscal Years: 2014
Keywords: crop, irrigation, forecasting

Research Question

The research objective is to develop a modeling framework to forecast crop irrigation water requirements (CIR) from daily to seasonal time scales.

Need and Benefit

Need - use of state-of-the-science modeling of crop irrigation water requirements at daily to seasonal time scales.

The following benefits are anticipated from this project.

(1) Irrigation water demands constitute 80 percent or more of the overall water demand in a water resources system. Using state-of-the-science methods to forecast crop irrigation water requirements could add to the overall water use efficiency.

(2) As part of the framework, effort will be made to see how the research can be moved to operations, and be incorporated at least in a few cases as an experimental forecast to operations product using Reclamations's exisitng operations and planning models.

(3) A generic modeling framework that would be scalable across all of Reclamation Regions and Projects.

Contributing Partners

Contact the Principal Investigator for information about partners.

Research Products

Not Reviewed

The following documents were not reviewed. Statements made in these documents are those of the authors. The findings have not been verified.

Forecasting Crop Irrigation Water Requirements (final, PDF, 507KB)
By Cameron Bracken, Subhrendu Gangopadhyay and Tom Pruitt
Report completed on October 01, 2014

A conglomeration of tools have been developed over a period of years for estimating crop irrigation water requirements (CIR) and are currently being used to support the Reclamation West-Wide Climate Risk Assessment (WWCRA) agricultural water demand estimation as well as projects under the Reclamation Basin Study Program.

The objective of this research was to develop a computing framework using open-source and platform-independent software to forecast CIR from daily to seasonal time scales.

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Last Updated: 6/22/20