Classification and Validation of Soil Moisture Data to Quantify Crop Water Requirement for Olive Plant

Quantifying crop water requirement accurately can save two precious interdependent resources: water and energy. The soil moisture data can play an important role to determine the crop water requirements. To that end, understanding the water movements in soil-plant continuum, in other words classifying and quantifying soil moisture data related to water movements is the key to determine the crop water requirements. This study used numerical methods to classify and quantify the soil moisture data collected from an olive orchard located at the California State University Fresno Agricultural Laboratory in terms of infiltration, plant root intake, etc. Results show that the water movement is more evident in the upper portion of the soil column than in the lower portion of the column of 42 '' depth. Less infiltration is observed in the bottom soil layers as less water is available for infiltration after the applied water consumed by the plant root in the top soil layers. Results also show that the calculated average crop water requirement for summer found in this study is about 12.1 percent less than the crop water requirement based on traditional ET based method.