Abstract
Irrigation can provide significant agronomic and financial returns on agricultural activity. The maximization of the benefits obtained from irrigation depends, among other factors, on the water use efficiency, which is intrinsically related to application uniformity. For the sprinkler method, the irrigation uniformity assessment is based on results of labor-intensive field tests in which the two-dimensional water distribution pattern is measured in a grid of catch cans. The aim of this study was to evaluate a simplified methodology for determining the irrigation uniformity using water depth distribution data of a single sprinkler head in operation, positioned at the intersection of two diagonal alignments containing regularly spaced catch cans. Three methods to simulate the spatial water distribution on the alignments were evaluated: linear interpolation (LI), cubic spline (SC) and second-degree polynomial regression (PR). Each of these methods were associated with a procedure to calculate the two-dimensional spatial water distribution. The adequacy of the LI and SC modeling methods was verified by using the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test (p-value < 0.05) applied to the data of the field tests. Mean values of the coefficient of efficiency equals to 0.771 and 0.785 were obtained for the LI and SC methods, respectively. The PR method underperformed the others.
Highlights
Irrigation technology can provide significant benefits to crop yield, production quality and financial return
For the irrigation project designing, it is necessary to define the percentage of adequately irrigated area (Pa), which corresponds to the percentage of the irrigated area that received a water depth equal to or greater than the net irrigation depth in each irrigation, after discounting the evaporation and wind drift losses
These results indicate a slightly better performance of cubic spline (CS) method compared to linear interpolation (LI)
Summary
Irrigation technology can provide significant benefits to crop yield, production quality and financial return. It turns feasible the agricultural activities in periods of high risk of production losses associated to insufficient or irregular rainfall. Irrigation imposes the main demand for water resources among the multiple uses of water in Brazil (ANA, 2018), which indicates the importance of seeking high efficiencies. The dn is the net irrigation depth needed to raise the soil water content to the field capacity. The distribution efficiency associated to a Pa value (DE ) is the ratio between d and the average irrigation
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