Initial Evaluation of CropManage Decision-Support Model for Vineyard ET Estimation

The CropManage(CM) decision-support web application was originally developed by U.C. Cooperative Extension to support evapotranspiration (ET) based irrigation scheduling and nutrient management of cool-season vegetables. The model uses prescribed crop phenology curves to develop daily estimates of fractional green canopy cover (Fc) within the field. Periodic Fc observations acquired by ground-based methods or imported from NASA’s Satellite Irrigation Management Support (SIMS) can be used to adjust the prescribed timeseries for such factors as weather anomalies or non-standard agronomic practice, as needed. Fc is then converted to daily crop coefficient (fraction of reference ET) values. The crop coefficient is combined with reference evapotranspiration, collected by the California Irrigation Management Information System, to derive daily ET estimates for the given field. Irrigation runtime recommendations are issued for a given date based on total ET since the last irrigation event (less any rainfall), and corrected for distribution uniformity of the water delivery system. In this project, CM was adapted to vineyards by adding sub-models to account for early-season depletion of stored soil moisture, cover crop presence, and intentional water stress. An initial trial was performed on a Central Coast winegrape vineyard, where an eddy covariance tower measured daily ET during from May-Dec 2020. Total ET for the period showed strong agreement between the tower-based measurements (443 mm) and the CM model (431 mm). The model tended to overestimate cumulative ET during mid-June by up to 30 mm (about 15%) and later underestimated cumulative ET by as much as 65 mm (about 23%) in late September, suggesting that additional model calibration is needed to improve simulation of within-season variability. Results will be reported for trials on additional vineyard sites conducted during the 2021 season.