Speaker
Description
Sicily is a Mediterranean region with evident structural problems of water scarcity and especially in this last period of the last 12 months we are having a severe drought crisis. The climate change emphasises the typical characteristic of the Mediterranean semiarid climate of our region.
Different strategies can be adopted to contrast water scarcity and to mitigate the impact of the climate change, e.g.: chose of crops with lower needs, agronomical technics of soil management to optimize soil water content, fine definition of the optimal crop cycle duration, improvement of farm and territorial infrastructures for saving and distribution of water resources.
One of this concerns the possibility to introduce and apply DSS to optimize the use of irrigation water resources.
IRRISIAS is the web-based SIAS model for water balance and irrigation scheduling at farm scale. Operationally implemented on the SIAS information system platform, IRRISAS provides the user, as a final result, an estimate of the irrigation needs, related to the evolution of the water reserve in the soil. This estimate is determined through successive iterations over time, on a daily basis. Estimation of the irrigation variables is based on an iterative calculation procedure that processes specific datasets and coefficients. The determination of irrigation day, watering volume value (also expressed in terms of system operating time irrigation) is calculated to restore the optimal water content in the soil, taking into account the soil water reserve (totally available water or Total Available Water, TAW), which depends on the hydrological characteristics and the depth of soil irrigation. From TAW and some specific characteristics of the crop, depends the water immediately available for the crop (Readily Available Water, RAW).
The main characteristics of IRRISIAS are: initialization by last irrigation date or conventional date (January, 1st of current year), farm precipitation data (if available), reconstruction of phenological cycle and calculation of Kcb for the different phases. The model runs for 50 cm soil depth irrigation, is possibility to apply a controlled water deficit and it also takes into account the SILAM forecasts for ET0 estimate in the 7 days following the execution date.
The results of the model are graphically represented as a farm irrigation scheme processed for each individual plot (parcel) entered by the user, indicated in the output with the related main irrigation variables.
