An investigation of reference evapotranspiration trends for crop water requirement estimation in Rajasthan

Abstract

Trends in reference evapotranspiration (ETo) estimated using Penman-Monteith equation were analysed over arid, semi-arid and humid regions of northwest (NW) India during 1985–2018. The MannKendall is used to determine significance of trends. Theil-Sen’s estimator and least square linear fitting methods are adopted to find slopes of the trend lines. The results indicated a significant decrease in ETo on annual basis for most of the locations and NW India as a whole. However, the trend was not statistically significant for seasonal ETo. The significant decrease in solar radiation and wind speed nullified the impact of increased temperature and resulted in slight decrease in ETo over arid and semi-arid regions of NW India which could probably be attributed to the increased dust hazy conditions prevailing. In NW India, water is a limiting resource the decrease in ETo may help researchers in decision makers to develop water assets and utilize the irrigation systems more effectively. There was also an increasing trend in production of major crops in the study region. Further, in near future, if this decreasing ETo trend were to remain, it would help in intensification of cropping system with the existing water resource.

Keywords

• Reference evapotranspiration
• Trends,
• Penman-Monteith method
• Crop water requirement