Satellite-based irrigation tools to manage irrigation water more precisely in avocado groves

Ali Montazar, UCCE Irrigation and Water Management Advisor

in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial Counties  

The water requirement of a crop must be satisfied to achieve optimum potential yields. The crop water requirement is called crop evapotranspiration and is usually represented as ETc. By combining reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and the proper crop coefficient (Kc), crop water use (ETc) can be determined as ETc = ETo × Kc. ETo is an estimation of evapotranspiration for short grass canopy under a well-managed, non-stressed condition. ETo is the main driver to estimate or forecast crop water needs. There are user-friendly satellite-based irrigation tools available that may assist growers to schedule irrigation more effectively. These tools provide ETo forecast for up to six days in the future or/and actual ET at the scale of individual fields. This article introduces three satellite-based irrigation tools including FRET, IrriSAT, and OpenET. A comparison of the estimated daily crop water needs utilizing OpenET tool and actual ET measured for a period of 150-day is also presented for an avocado grove in the San Pasqual Valley, Escondido.

Read more about this study: https://ceventura.ucanr.edu/Com_Ag/Subtropical/?newsletteritem=100493

 A screen dump of cumulative ET (inch) for the entire western states in 2021. You may zoom on the OpenET map to find your orchard for a specific time (daily, monthly, yearly) and explore the data.