Statistical analysis on environmental limitations on threshold-based irrigation management

During the past four years (1988-1991), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) performed an experiment testing a theory known as the Thermal Kinetic Window (TKW) theory. This theory proposes that each species of crop can have an optimal yield if its canopy temperature can be kept within a window of temperatures. The main crop of study was cotton which has a TKW between 23° C and 32° C. An extensive amount of data was collected over the four years of study. The main purpose of this paper will be to present a method of extracting certain pieces of this data so that meaningful analyses can be performed to determine the permissiveness of the environment in allowing the canopy temperature to remain within the TKW. Some of these analyses will also be included in this paper.