Water requirements of maize in the middle Heihe River basin, China

Wenzhi Zhao, Bing Liu and Zhihui Zhang

Agricultural Water Management, 2010, vol. 97, issue 2, 215-223

Abstract: As part of an intercomparison study on crop evapotranspiration (ETc), six methods for estimating ETc have been applied to maize field in the middle Heihe River basin, China. The ETc was estimated by the soil water balance and Bowen ratio-energy balance methods while the Priestley-Taylor, Penman, Penman-Monteith and Hargreaves methods were used for estimating the reference evapotranspiration (ET0). The results showed that the trend of ETc was very similar, while the differences were significant among the different methods. The variations of ETc were closely related to the LAI as well as to the meteorological features. The ETc for the Bowen ratio-energy balance, Penman, Penman-Monteith, soil water balance, Priestley-Taylor and Hargreaves methods totaled 777.75, 693.13, 618.34, 615.67, 560.31 and 552.07mm, respectively, with the daily mean values for 5.26, 4.68, 4.18, 4.16, 3.79 and 3.73mmday-1. The Penman-Monteith method provided fairly good estimation of ETo as compared with the Priestley-Taylor, Penman, Hargreaves methods. By contrast with the Penman-Monteith method, the Bowen ratio-energy balance and Penman methods were 25.8% and 12.0% higher, while the Priestley-Taylor and Hargreaves methods were 9.4% and 10.7% lower, respectively. Therefore, the Hargreaves and Priestley-Taylor methods were the alternative ETc methods in arid regions of Northwest China.

Keywords: Maize; Crop; evapotranspiration; Leaf; area; index; Crop; coefficient (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378-3774(09)00280-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:97:y:2010:i:2:p:215-223

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().