A Comparison of Methods for Estimating Evapotranspiration (ET) in a Semi-Arid Agricultural System

Abstract:

In the intermountain West, much like the rest of the world, agriculture is the oldest and largest water consumer. Particularly in the arid headwaters states of the intermountain west changing water demands are highlighting the importance of water use efficiency in agriculture. In flood irrigation an area is irrigated until saturation is achieved although crops only consume a portion of the total water applied. The remaining water eventually returns to streams or aquifers. Accurately quantifying the portion of applied water that is consumptively used—and its corollary in the form of return flows—represents an important avenue for potential water use reduction in the face of increasing demands from sundry downstream users.

Consumptive use has historically been understood as the difference between the irrigation water applied and irrigation water returned to adjacent surface waters via quick or delayed return flow as well as overland flow. Penman-derived models, which calculate evapotranspiration based on meteorological data, are another widely recognized method for estimating consumptive use. We determined consumptive use on an agricultural field in northeastern Wyoming using both of these two traditional methods as well as a quantitative scintillometer-based estimate, which couples meteorological data with the latent heat flux across a field to measure evapotranspiration for a given area. Since the wider application of the scintillometer is limited by the instrument’s complexity and cost, a comparison of the resulting data with these two more customary methods provides critical insight in to where certain methods might under or overestimate consumptive use. The purpose of this comparison is twofold. First, the comparison of these three methods allows for the optimization of a reach-scale water budget that aims to better characterize and quantify return flow processes. Second, the addition of information that couples hydrology, meteorology, geophysics, and heat fluxes over one particular area enhances the corpus of comparative data from which academics and managers can refine extant strategies for consumptive use estimation.