Evapotranspiration simulated by CRITERIA and AquaCrop models in stony soils

Submitted: 30 January 2015
Accepted: 11 April 2015
Published: 16 June 2015
Abstract Views: 2177
PDF: 663
HTML: 899
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Authors

  • Pasquale Campi pasquale.campi@entecra.it Unità di Ricerca per i Sistemi Colturali degli Ambienti Caldo-Aridi, Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l'Analisi dell'Economia Agraria, Bari, Italy.
  • Francesca Modugno Unità di Ricerca per i Sistemi Colturali degli Ambienti Caldo-Aridi, Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l'Analisi dell'Economia Agraria, Bari, Italy.
  • Alejandra Navarro Unità di Ricerca per i Sistemi Colturali degli Ambienti Caldo-Aridi, Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l'Analisi dell'Economia Agraria, Bari, Italy.
  • Fausto Tomei ARPA Emilia-Romagna, Servizio Idro-Meteo-Clima, Bologna, Italy.
  • Giulia Villani ARPA Emilia-Romagna, Servizio Idro-Meteo-Clima, Bologna; Dipartimento di Scienze e Tecnologie Agro-Alimentari, Università di Bologna, Italy.
  • Marcello Mastrorilli Unità di Ricerca per i Sistemi Colturali degli Ambienti Caldo-Aridi, Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l'Analisi dell'Economia Agraria, Bari, Italy.
The performance of a water balance model is also based on the ability to correctly perform simulations in heterogeneous soils. The objective of this paper is to test CRITERIA and AquaCrop models in order to evaluate their suitability in estimating evapotranspiration at the field scale in two types of soil in the Mediterranean region: non-stony and stony soil. The first step of the work was to calibrate both models under the non-stony conditions. The models were calibrated by using observations on wheat crop (leaf area index or canopy cover, and phenological stages as a function of degree days) and pedo-climatic measurements. The second step consisted in the analysing the impact of the soil type on the models performances by comparing simulated and measured values. The outputs retained in the analysis were soil water content (at the daily scale) and crop evapotranspiration (at two time scales: daily and crop season). The model performances were evaluated through four statistical tests: normalised difference (D%) at the seasonal time scale; and relative root mean square error (RRMSE), efficiency index (EF), coefficient of determination (r2) at the daily scale. At the seasonal scale, values of D% were less than 15% in stony and on-stony soils, indicating a good performance attained by both models. At the daily scale, the RRMSE values (<30%) indicate that the evapotranspiration simulated by CRITERIA is acceptable in both soil types. In the stony soil conditions, 3 out 4 statistical tests (RRMSE, EF, r2) indicate the inadequacy of AquaCrop to simulate correctly daily evapotranspiration. The higher performance of CRITERIA model to simulate daily evapotranspiration in stony soils, is due to the soil submodel, which requires the percentage skeleton as an input, while AquaCrop model takes into account the presence of skeleton by reducing the soil volume.

Dimensions

Altmetric

PlumX Metrics

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Citations

How to Cite

Campi, P., Modugno, F., Navarro, A., Tomei, F., Villani, G., & Mastrorilli, M. (2015). Evapotranspiration simulated by CRITERIA and AquaCrop models in stony soils. Italian Journal of Agronomy, 10(2), 67–73. https://doi.org/10.4081/ija.2015.658