A simulation study of comparison of the evaluation procedures for three irrigation methods

Standard evaluation procedures, based on field measurements and statistical, hydraulic models, have been developed for assessing irrigation systems performance. However, given the diverse nature of the irrigation methods, it is not possible to use a unique evaluation procedure. Ideally, variables would be measured at every point throughout the field under study, but that is clearly impractical. Instead, measurements are taken of selected samples, or irrigation models are used to predict field-wide distributions of the variables. In this paper, irrigation models for trickle, sprinkler and furrow irrigation are used to assess how well the irrigation performance indicators generated by standard procedures match those generated by whole-field simulations. Six performance indicators were used: distribution uniformity, uniformity coefficient of Christiansen, application efficiency, deep percolation ratio, tail water ratio and requirement efficiency. The analysis was applied to systems typical of cotton crops in Southern Spain. The results show that the procedure used to determine performance indicators in trickle irrigation provides good estimates of the whole field performance. The procedure used in sprinkler irrigation is also acceptable, but yields variable results. Finally, the standard procedure used for furrow irrigation produces biased, highly variable results and overestimates distribution uniformity.