TITLE:
Comparison of Methods for Estimating Crop Water Use: Sap Flow, FAO-56 Penman-Monteith, and Weather Parameters
AUTHORS:
Younsuk Dong, Hunter Hansen
KEYWORDS:
Crop Water Use, Irrigation, Sap Flow, Evapotranspiration, Weather Parameter
JOURNAL NAME:
Agricultural Sciences,
Vol.14 No.5,
May
8,
2023
ABSTRACT: Knowing crop water uptake each day is useful for developing irrigation scheduling. Many technologies have been used to estimate daily crop water use. Sap flow is one of the technologies that measure water flow through the stem of a plant and estimate daily crop water uptake. Sap flow sensor is an effective direct method for measuring crop water use, but it is relatively expensive and requires frequent maintenance. Therefore, alternative methods, such as evapotranspiration based on FAO 56 Penman-Monteith equation and other weather parameters were evaluated to find the correlation with sap flow. In this study, Dynamax Flow 32-1K sap flow system was utilized to monitor potato water use. The results show sap flow has a strong correlation with evapotranspiration (RMSE = 1.34, IA = 0.89, MBE = -0.83), solar radiation (RMSE = 2.25, IA = 0.72, MBE = -1.80), but not with air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and vapor pressure. It is worth noting that the R2 between sap flow and relative humidity was 0.55. This study has concluded that daily evapotranspiration and solar radiation can be used as alternative methods to estimate sap flow.