Performance Evaluation and Uncertainty Measurement in Irrigation Scheduling Soil Water-Balance Approach

Abstract

The present work aims at approaching the study of the performance and uncertainty associated with an irrigation scheduling method based on a soil-water balance. On a daily time step, a water-balance-based irrigation scheduling model has been developed. A Monte Carlo simulation of the irrigation scheduling model is developed using a series of actual daily weather data of evapotranspiration and precipitation and bootstrapping stochastic technique to resampling them. Performance evaluation measurements and their uncertainty are studied by means of several parameters: reliability, resiliency, vulnerability, total irrigation water allocation, total water loosed by deep percolation, and actual evapotranspiration/potential evapotranspiration rate along the growing season. The behaviors of 12 different types of soils (between coarse-textured soils and fine-textured soils) are compared using pedotransfer functions. Total available water (TAW) is the most important hydraulic property of the soil as far as irrigation scheduling performance is concerned. The statistical relationship between evaluation performance measures and TAW has been calculated. Soils with high values of TAW perform better. Rooting depth