Journal of Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers ISSN:1738-3692(Print) 2093-7709(Online) 한국농공학회논문집

This study aims to analyze the influences of applications of two different evapotranspiration (ET) estimation methods on the irrigation water requirements (IWR) for paddy rice and water supply reliability of agricultural reservoirs. The modified Penman (MP), traditional method, and the Penman-Monteith (PM), the new adopted method, were applied on 149 reservoirs located in Honam province for this study. The weather date was used from 1987 to 2016, and analysed the trends of temperature and rainfall during rice growing season between past and current 10 years respectively. The increased average temperature and rainfall were observed from the current 10 years compared to the past years. This phenomena impacts on the results of ET and IWR estimations with decreased IWR obtained from high rainfall regions and increased ET obtained high temperature regions. For the comparisons of application results of two ET approaches, the PM method showed lower ET and IWR, and hence more reliable storage capacity of the reservoirs respect to water supply to paddy fields. The results also showed that the influences of different ET methods applications on the water supply reliability of reservoirs are negligible for the cases of over 3.7 watershed ratio and 670 mm unit reservoir storage, while significant variations of the results obtain from the applications between two ET approaches for the opposite cases. Further studies are necessary to consider various field conditions for practical applications of the PM method estimating ET in the fields of paddy farming.