Evapotranspiration Measurement by Lysimeters in a Desert Climate PDF

Keywords

evapotranspiration, alfalfa, drainage

Abstract

Three identical drainage type lysimeters, 2x2x1 m in size, were installed at the Educational Farm of the College of Agriculture, King Saud University and planted with alfalfa to obtain reference crop evapotranspiration. The measured evapotranspiration was correlated with the evapotranspiration estimated from the Penman and Jensen- Haise methods using meteorological data from Dirab. The straight line correlation with intercept was not found to be significantly high under the local arid climatic conditions. A better correlation was obtained using a straight line correlation passing through the origin. The highest coefficient of correlation (R^2= 0.97) was obtained between the measured evapotranspiration from alfalfa and the evaporation from class A pan