Skip to main content
ARS Home » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #59667
Title: PROCEDURES FOR COMBINING DISTRIBUTION UNIFORMITY COMPONENTS

Author
item Clemmens, Albert
item SOLOMON, KENNETH - CALIF STATE UNIV, FRESNO

Submitted to: International Conference on Water Resources Engineering Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/18/1995
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: Competition for limited water supplies has escalated substantially over the last decade. Unfortunately there are many misconceptions about water use, particularly in irrigated agriculture. The potential water savings that might result from increases in irrigation efficiency are usually overestimated. Many of these misconceptions and erroneous estimates of water savings stem from misunderstandings about how irrigation performance measures are defined and used. An ASCE task committee was formed to help to clarify the definition of irrigation performance measures -- what they represent and what has to be measured in order to provide reasonable values. In practice, field measurements of irrigation uniformity are often used and extrapolated to infer efficiency. This has two problems. First, uniformity may limit the attainable efficiency, but they are conceptually very different performance measures. Second, only part of the uniformity of the irrigation system is measured. Whereas a global measure of uniformity is needed to make field measured uniformities of different types of irrigation systems comparable. In this paper, we present methods for combining the components that contribute to irrigation uniformity from simple field measurements, so that a representative, global uniformity can be estimated. The results of this work will benefit irrigation district personnel, support and regulatory agencies, consultants, farmers, and other water users.

Technical Abstract: For most irrigation systems, the most practical method for determining the global distribution uniformity (i.e. that experienced by the crop) is to measure the uniformity resulting from several components and combine them statistically. In this paper, procedures and equations are presented for determining global Distribution Uniformity from several components.