The Ways of Increasing Efficiency of Crop Irrigation Management with the Help of Automatic Weather Stations and ET Gages

The key condition of the efficient use of the Republic of Armenia (RA) water resources and sustainable management is to specify crop water requirement for carrying out due irrigation by using innovative technologies and techniques. With this aim by FAO method we calculated the design water requirement of spring wheat for vegetation period based on the recent 5-year data provided by the RA 3 fixed hydro meteorological stations and readings recorded by 3 automatic weather stations.The Kc coefficient was determined under permanent and dual-factor conditions. The crop design water requirement was determined for 3 regions, the obtained values were assessed according to the vegetation days under permanent and dual-factor conditions. The obtained results can help apply innovative approaches while specifying the irrigation and water consumption regimes under the RA conditions that allows increasing the efficiency of crop irrigation and water resource conservation. Considering the urgency of increasing the intra farm water use efficiency, the correlation was constructed between the readings of potential evapotranspiration measured by the ET gage and the data obtained from the automatic weather stations