Revised FAO Procedures for Calculating Evapotranspiration: Irrigation and Drainage Paper No. 56 with Testing in Idaho

In 1998, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published FAO Irrigation and Drainage Paper No. 56, a revision of the earlier and widely used Paper No. 24 for calculating evapotranspiration (ET) and crop water requirements. The revision uses a single method, the FAO Penman-Monteith equation, for calculating reference evapotranspiration (ET_o). In addition to the "mean" crop coefficient (K_c) values of FAO-24, FAO-56 provides tables of "basal" crop coefficients that represent ET under conditions having a dry soil surface. Associated equations for predicting evaporation from bare soil associated with crop transpiration are based on a water balance of the soil surface layer. Comparisons of daily ET from three agricultural crops are made between lysimeter measured ET and the basal K_c method of FAO-56 and the time-based basal K_c procedure of Wright (1982). Standard errors of estimate and accuracies were similar between the two methods and averaged about 0.77 mm/day or 15%.