- Title
- The effects of SILO & AWRA wind speeds on irrigation depth simulations
- Creator
- Bretreger, David; Yeo, In-Young
- Relation
- 23rd International Congress on Modelling and Simulation. Proceedings of 23rd International Congress on Modelling and Simulation (MODSIM2019) (Canberra, ACT, Australia 01-06 December, 2019) p. 1119-1125
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.36334/modsim.2019.k17.bretreger2
- Publisher
- Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- The availability of meteorological data can be sparse across Australia, particularly in regional areas, leading to the use of gridded products. Available gridded products range from measured data such as precipitation and temperature to derived variables such as the various techniques used to describe evapotranspiration (ET). The lack of automatic weather stations that provide ET, compared to numbers of rain gauges, means these gridded ET products are potentially of more value due to the large distances between users and the nearest observation. Gridded data is currently available through the Scientific Information for Land Owners (SILO) service as well as through the Australian Water Resources Assessment Landscape (AWRA) model and datasets from the Australian Water Availability Project (AWAP). These services provide grids for many variables used in hydrology and its related fields. The AWAP and SILO products have previously been compared although they predominately focused on the differences between the rainfall variables and interpolation methods. Another key difference between the products, that relates to this paper, is that AWRA uses a climatologically derived wind speed in its ET calculations, whereas SILO assumes a speed of 2 m/s. Using a varying wind speed has been found to be an important factor in semi-arid regions when looking at crop water use, this may be particularly relevant in agricultural regions of Australia. Only the precipitation (P) and reference crop ET (𝐸𝐸𝐸𝐸0) product variables will be used in this paper. The paper describes the comparison of using the two available products as inputs to interact with the remote sensing observations obtained from Digital Earth Australia. The P and 𝐸𝐸𝐸𝐸0 are predominate drivers in the method. The AET is found using the methods outlined in FAO56, although the crop coefficients are derived from remote sensing observations. The simulations were performed over four sites, this includes an almond orchard, two vineyards and a cotton farm. The results show that for annual simulations, there were only small differences between the two products, although the AWRA methods produced smaller standard deviations. The 2 m/s wind speed assumed in the SILO calculation was found to be much lower than the local statistical averages at nearby gauge sites. This led to the AWRA and SILO products deviating during summer, when higher winds are causing higher ET values, which is not accounted for in the SILO dataset. This paper aims to give an indication of the possible implementations for farmers or natural resource managers may see due to changing their systems from SILO to the technically improved AWRA product. It may also provide additional insight into how further research may be impacted by choosing one of the gridded products over the other. The current results indicate that the technical improvements implemented in AWRA are providing slight improvements in irrigation simulations. This may encourage natural resource managers to alter their methods to achieve better results for their specific scenario.
- Subject
- silo; awra; irrigation; wind speed; evapotranspiration; SDG 6; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1460290
- Identifier
- uon:45920
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780975840092
- Language
- eng
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