No abstract

The present work aims to quantify the impact of climate change (CC) on the grain yields of irrigated cereals and their water requirements in the Tensift region of Morocco. The Med-CORDEX (MEDiterranean COordinated Regional Climate Downscaling EXperiment) ensemble runs under scenarios RCP4.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway) and RCP8.5 are first evaluated and disaggregated using the quantile-quantile approach. The impact of CC on the duration of the main wheat phenological stages based on the degree-day approach is then analyzed. The results show that the rise in air temperature causes a shortening of the development cycle of up to 50 days. The impacts of rising temperature and changes in precipitation on wheat yields are next evaluated, based on the AquaCrop model, both with and without taking into account the fertilizing effect of CO2. As expected, optimal wheat yields will decrease on the order of 7 to 30% if CO2 concentration rise is not considered. The fertilizing effect of CO2 can counterbalance yield losses, since optimal yields could increase by 7% and 13% respectively at mid-century for the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. Finally, water requirements are expected to decrease by 13 to 42%, mainly in response to the shortening of the cycle. This decrease is associated with a change in temporal patterns, with the requirement peak coming two months earlier than under current conditions.

In irrigation schemes under rotational water supply in semiarid region, the water allocation and irrigation scheduling are often based on a fixed-area proportionate water depth with every irrigation cycle irrespective of crops and their growth stages, for an equitable water supply. An experiment was conducted during the 2004- 2005 season in Haouz irrigated area in Morocco, which objective was i) to evaluate the effects of the surface irrigation scheduling method (existing rule) adopted by the irrigation agency on winter wheat production compared to a full irrigation method and ii) to evaluate drip irrigation versus surface irrigation impacts on water saving and yield of winter wheat. The methodology was based on the FAO-56 dual approach for the surface irrigation scheduling. Ground measurements of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were used to derive the basal crop coefficient and the vegetation fraction cover. The simple FAO-56 approach was used for drip irrigation scheduling. For surface irrigation, the existing rule approach resulted in yield and WUE reductions of 22% and 15%, respectively, compared with the optimized irrigation scheduling proposed by the FAO-56 for full irrigation treatment. This revealed the negative effects of the irrigation schedules adopted in irrigation schemes under rotational water supply on crops productivity. It was also demon-strated that drip irrigation applied to wheat was more efficient with 20% of water saving in comparison with surface irrigation (full irrigation treatment). Drip irrigation gives also higher wheat yield compared to surface irrigation (+28% and +52% for full irrigation and existing rule treatments respectively). The same improvement was observed for water use efficiency (+24 and +59% respectively)

Monitoring irrigation is essential for an efficient management of water resources in arid and semi-arid regions. We propose to estimate the timing and the amount of irrigation throughout the agricultural season using optical and thermal Landsat-7/8 data. The approach is implemented in four steps: i) partitioning the Landsat land surface temperature (LST) to derive the crop water stress coefficient (Ks), ii) estimating the daily root zone soil moisture (RZSM) from the integration of Landsat-derived Ks into a crop water balance model, iii) retrieving irrigation at the Landsat pixel scale and iv) aggregating pixel-scale irrigation estimates at the crop field scale. The new irrigation retrieval method is tested over three agricultural areas during four seasons and is evaluated over five winter wheat fields under different irrigation techniques (drip, flood and no-irrigation). The model is very accurate for the seasonal accumulated amounts (R ~ 0.95 and RMSE ~ 44 mm). However, lower agreements with observed irrigations are obtained at the daily scale. To assess the performance of the irrigation retrieval method over a range of time periods, the daily predicted and observed irrigations are cumulated from 1 to 90 days. Generally, acceptable errors (R = 0.52 and RMSE = 27 mm) are obtained for irrigations cumulated over 15 days and the performance gradually improves by increasing the accumulation period, depicting a strong link to the frequency of Landsat overpasses (16 days or 8 days by combining Landsat-7 and-8). Despite the uncertainties in retrieved irrigations at daily to weekly scales, the daily RZSM and evapotranspiration simulated from the retrieved daily irrigations are estimated accurately and are very close to those estimated from actual irrigations. This research demonstrates the utility of high spatial resolution optical and thermal data for estimating irrigation and consequently for better closing the water budget over agricultural areas. We also show that significant improvements can be expected at daily to weekly time scales by reducing the revisit time of high-spatial resolution thermal data, as included in the TRISHNA future mission requirements.

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