Improvement of FAO-56 Model to Estimate Transpiration Fluxes of Drought Tolerant Crops under Soil Water Deficit: Application for Olive Groves
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 140, Issue 9
Abstract
Agro-hydrological models are considered an economic and simple tool for quantifying crop water requirements. In the last two decades, agro-hydrological physically based models have been developed to simulate mass and energy exchange processes in the soil-plant-atmosphere system. Although very reliable, because of the high number of required variables, simplified models have been proposed to quantify crop water consumes. The main aim of this paper is to propose an amendment of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations FAO-56 spreadsheet program to introduce a more realistic shape of the stress function, valid for mature olive orchards (Olea europaea L.). The modified model is successively validated by means of the comparison between measured and simulated soil water contents and actual transpiration fluxes. These outputs are finally compared with those obtained with the original version of the model. Experiments also allowed assessing the ability of simulated crop water stress coefficients to explain the actual water stress conditions evaluated on the basis of measured relative transpirations and midday stem water potentials. The results show that the modified model significantly improves the estimation of actual crop transpiration fluxes and soil water contents under soil water deficit conditions, according to the RMSEs associated with the revised model, resulting in significantly higher than the corresponding values obtained with the original version.
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Acknowledgments
A special thanks to Dr. Pierluigi Crescimanno, manager of the Tenute Rocchetta farm, which hosted the experiments, and for his great sensibility to any subject related to environmental safeguard. Research was carried out in the frame of the PRIN 2010 projects, co-financed by Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (MIUR) and FFR 2012–2013 granted by Università degli Studi di Palermo. Contributions to the manuscript were shared among the authors as follows: Experimental setup, data processing, and final revision of the text were divided equally among the authors; field data collection was handled by G. R.; and text was written by G. R. and G. P.
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Published In
Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 140 • Issue 9 • September 2014
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 3, 2013
Accepted: Nov 18, 2013
Published online: Jan 6, 2014
Discussion open until: Jun 6, 2014
Published in print: Sep 1, 2014
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