Comparative Evaluation of Evapotranspiration Models for Irrigation Scheduling in Garden Pea
摘要
Irrigation scheduling is crucial for optimizing water footprints, ensuring crops receive the exact amount of water needed for optimal growth. This approach minimizes water waste and promotes sustainable agricultural practices. A field experiment was conducted at the Research Farm of the Department of Agronomy, CSK Himachal Pradesh Krishi Vishvavidyalaya, Palampur, India, during the rabi season of 2021–22 and 2022–23 to evaluate three evapotranspiration (ET) models, viz., Penman–Monteith, Penman temperature and Spatial reference ET, and compared them with limited and full irrigation conditions. The experiment included fifteen treatment combinations, with five irrigation treatments in main plots and three sowing windows in sub-plots and was carried out in a split-plot design with three replications. Amongst various irrigation scheduling methods, full irrigation (six irrigations), spatial reference PET, ET0 by Penman–Monteith modified and Penman temperature method resulted in higher values of yield attributes, yield and benefit–cost ratio compared to limited irrigations (two irrigations) when sown during the 42nd Standard Meteorological Week (SMW) (20th October). The estimation of crop water requirement using the Penman–Monteith modified method with real-time weather data was proved to be the best for irrigation scheduling to reduce crop water footprints compared to other methods (14.6% and 13.8% less than full irrigation) of crop water requirement. However, in data-limited situations, Penman temperature can be used as an alternative method to compute crop water requirements.