N1.04 Gibson 2018 ReNUWIt Annual Meeting Poster

Consumptive water use or evapotranspiration (ET) for crops and riparian vegetation is required in the hydrologic budget of a region for water management purposes. The demand for managing water in near real-time is increasing due to scarcity of water especially in arid environments. Due to this near real-time demand, water managers and decision makers are increasingly interested in the computer based hydrologic models to provide estimates of water budget of a region. Current hydrologic models use either direct measured values or indirect calculated values that depend on meteorological data as input to the model.

A methodology for estimating ET of saltcedar (Tamarix spp.) using a polynomial crop coefficient as a function of heat units is presented. This methodology could easily be implemented as an improvement in estimating ET of saltcedar in existing hydrologic models.