Determination of Date Palm Water Requirements in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Many technologies, such as irrigation scheduling, advanced irrigation systems, limited irrigation methods, soil moisture management, wastewater irrigation, can be used to reduce the problems attributed to date palm irrigation. Improvement of water management is required at all levels of irrigation including planning and design, project implementation, and operation and maintenance. This chapter provides information to determine the monthly and annual water requirements by date palm in eight different regions of Saudi Arabia that help improve irrigation water management. Areas selected for this study are located in regions of the Medina (Al Ula), Tabuk (Teimaa), Makkah (Al Jumum), Al Jouf (Sakakah), Riyadh (Sodos), Qassim (Riyad Al Khabra, Hail (AL Kaedh), and East Region (Al Ahsa). Irrigation water requirements (m3/ha) after taking into account the proportion of cultivated area of date palm for each year were found to be 9495.24, 7340.18, 7298.93, 8913.59, 8614.96, 8568.68, 7996.99, 8510.72 m3/ha, respectively, per 100 Date Palm trees/ha. The annual total irrigation water requirements (m3/tree) in these regions is 95, 73.4, 73, 89, 86, 85.7, 80, 85 m3, respectively as the radius of shaded area per tree is 3.5 m. The decrease of the crop water requirement (CRW) in all sites of study to around 8000 m3/ha from previously reported by many researchers is mainly attributed to percentage of shaded area of date palm tree. Therefore, it is recommended that the practice of a distance between trees to 10 m × 10 m should be changed to 7 m × 7 m in order to reduce the estimation of CRW of date palm trees.