When to irrigate? How much?
INIA Monitoring Program provides quick, efficient and practical recommendations.
What do INIA offer?
A practical, efficient and easy to operate tool for irrigation management and monitoring, that estimates the daily crop water requirements to be applied in the next 1 to 2 days.
Scientific parameters
Soil physical parameters
Soil samples are collected to characterize the physical and hydraulic properties of the soil profile (soil texture, porosity, bulk density, soil structure, soil water characteristics, etc.) .
Crop parameters
Plants characteristics such as leaf area, plant height, root depth, plant density and spacing, crop growth stage and seasonal water use.
Irrigation system
All technical information of the irrigation method and system of each field, such as the minimum and maximum daily irrigation water depth, minimum time of application, water flow, uniformity and efficiency, is also stored.
Climatic parameters
INIA has a network of automatic weather stations to provide daily weather data (air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, wind speed, atmospheric pressure and rainfall) for each region. 10 weather stations were installed in all country, and transmit data in real time to INIA's central server.
Computing procedures
The server in the headquarter (SISTEMA IRRIGA, Brazil) has models and program routines to process information on soil, plant, climate and irrigation system for each irrigated field and recommends precisely when and how much water to apply. Crop evapotranspiration is estimated by Pemann-Monteith method, detailed in FAO-56. The models take into consideration all parameters of the soil water balance, such as evapotranspiration, surface runoff, effective precipitation and constant measurements of the water content of soil profile.
INIA Irrigation Monitoring Service is based on Sistema IrrigaTM , developed by the Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil.
