Adaptation of irrigation scheduling management techniques to the design of small irrigation systems

Date

1993-05

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Texas Tech University

Abstract

In spite of the high expectations, irrigation development has not proved successful in the arid and semiarid areas of the Sub-Saharan African countries where introduction of irrigation was expected to solve food crises and provide foreign exchange earned from export crops. Irrigation system performance problems have been attributed to poor initial planning and design and lack of foresight of the management environment in which the completed irrigation system would be operated. To address this problem, a comprehensive methodology for sizing an irrigation hydraulic system capacity is developed. The methodology includes computer-supported models for generating both synthetic climatic and hydrologic data. Also included are irrigation scheduling models for determining irrigation interval frequencies and monthly total irrigation requirements. In the methodology, basic probability concepts are combined with water production theory and economic risk analysis to demonstrate how to arrive at an optimum size of irrigation systems. Application of the methodology is demonstrated with real data from around San Angelo, Tom Green County, on a hypothetical situation.

Description

Keywords

Irrigation -- Data processing, Irrigation -- Texas -- Tom Green County, Irrigation -- Management -- Data processing, Irrigation engineering -- Data processing

Citation