NEW CORRELATION FOR ESTIMATING REFERENCE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION IN A SEMI  ARID REGION

EDEBEATU; CHINEDU C.; OKUJAGU; CHARITY U

Volume : IV, Issue : XII, December - 2015

NEW CORRELATION FOR ESTIMATING REFERENCE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION IN A SEMI ARID REGION

Edebeatu, Chinedu C. , Okujagu, Charity U

Abstract :

Water is an essential component of human existence and survival and exists in different forms such as rainfall, rivers, etc and man – made stream called irrigation. In agriculture and modern farming, irrigation is essential for all year round food crop production, agricultural management practices and irrigation scheduling. Food crop production is needed in the face of climate change to overcome food security challenges in the developing countries like Nigeria. This implies the determination of water requirement of any field via evapotranspiration. Different methods have been developed and deployed in modeling evapotranspiration. The need for accurate weather data has led scientists, engineers and researchers to develop different methods for the measurement and models for its estimation. In this work, we developed a new evapotranspiration ETo model for estimating evapotranspiration in a semi – arid region. The new ETo model showed significant agreement with the established Standard of the Penman – Monteith.