WaterCROP

Introduction

WaterCROP performs spatially-explicit estimates of daily crop-specific actual evapotranspiration ETa,j (where j runs from the planting day to the harvesting day), which quantifies the amount of water (in mm·day-1) that a crop consumes via evapotranspiration throughout the growing season. This is a function of climatic and phenological properties, as well as agricultural practices. WaterCROP determines daily ET0 through a linear interpolation of monthly ET0 data, with monthly averages assigned to the middle of each month. Daily ETa,j is then calculated following the FAO56 method for each year. The ETa,j estimate is equal to the product of: the daily water stress coefficient (ks,j), that is a proxy for the daily water deficiency in the unsaturated soil layer; the daily crop coefficient (kc,j), that integrates the effects of crop height, crop-soil surface resistance, and albedo of the crop-soil surface; and the daily ET0 from a hypothetical well-watered grass surface with fixed crop height, albedo and canopy resistance

Model structure

Input data and scenarios

WaterCROP accomodates 5 arc minute (1/12°; ∼ 10 km) input data and crop-specific information. Precipitation and reference evapotranspiration data are required as input data to the model, as well as crop yields (ton·ha-1) and harvested areas (ha), crop coefficients, soil properties, soil available water content, root zone depth and the depletion fraction.

Running the model

Analysing the outputs

Runtime, frequent issues, and FAQs

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Preparing a new country analysis

Designing a new scenario