Smart Irrigation Manager: A Simple User-Friendly Software for Determining Irrigation Scheduling

Smart Irrigation Manager (SIM) is a user-friendly standalone software run on Windows, which is developed to help growers, agronomists and irrigation engineers to develop irrigation schedules using basic information of soil water balance, crop characteristics and atmospheric conditions. SIM can be us...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hassan M. Abd El Baki, Asad Sarwar Qureshi, Haruyuki Fujimaki
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2025-12-01
Series:Smart Agricultural Technology
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Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772375525005180
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Summary:Smart Irrigation Manager (SIM) is a user-friendly standalone software run on Windows, which is developed to help growers, agronomists and irrigation engineers to develop irrigation schedules using basic information of soil water balance, crop characteristics and atmospheric conditions. SIM can be used to 1) Estimate reference evapotranspiration (ET0) using three different approaches, including the modified FAO Penman-Monteith (FAO-PM), Hargreaves model and the Blaney‒Criddle equation; 2) Estimate irrigation water requirements for single irrigation events using the Kc-ET0 and soil water depletion methods; and 3) develop irrigation schedules using the Kc-ET0 and Evapotranspiration–Soil Water Balance (ET-SWB) methods. The performance of SIM has been tested using data from three different climatic zones: arid (ICBA, UAE), humid continental (ALRC, Japan) and Mediterranean (ICARDA, Morocco), while the daily ET0 estimated by SIM was compared to that calculated by the FAO ET0 calculator. SIM fairly estimated the daily ET0 using the FAO-PM method with average root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.05 mm d‒1, while the daily estimates using the Hargreaves and Blaney‒Criddle methods were overestimated with average RMSE of 0.45 mm d‒1 and 2.1 mm d‒1, respectively. Local calibration of daily ET0 estimated by these two methods resulted in similar estimates of crop water requirements to those of the FAO-PM across all sites. SIM can be potentially used to develop irrigation scheduling scenarios; however, it is highly recommended to use the FAO Kc-ET0 instead of the ET-SWB for coarse soil or desert regions with low precipitation.
ISSN:2772-3755