Project Number: 5347-13000-015-04
Project Type: Specific Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Sep 25, 2007
End Date: Jun 30, 2009

Objective:
The objective of this research is to explore the potential for improving the performance of basin irrigation systems under the current irrigation technology and management conditions of farms in the Yuma-Mesa area of southwest Arizona, to develop hydraulically-based management guidelines and/or strategies that can be easily applied by typical field irrigators, and to test those strategies in the field.

Approach:
We propose to explore the range of infiltration, roughness, and flow conditions that can be encountered on a field and how that impacts the performance with the operational strategy currently used by irrigators. Such an analysis would involve monitoring a limited number of events over the irrigation season on three fields. Those fields would be selected based on the quality of land grading i.e., good, average, and poor. Complete field evaluations would be conducted at these sites to determine changes in infiltration characteristics and hydraulic roughness from one event to the next. Required measurements would include those typically collected in field evaluations (inflow, advance, recession, field bottom elevations), but with advance, recession, and field bottom elevations determined on a rectangular grid. In addition, water level hydrographs would also be measured at selected locations. Those measurements will be used to estimate hydraulic roughness. Data collected from these events will used to determine the range of infiltration, roughness, and inflow rates that the irrigator actually has to deal with. Hydraulic analysis with simulation models will be used to explore the potential for improving performance under the given field conditions. Similarly, hydraulic analysis will be used to explore the potential performance improvement with improvements in land grading. Documents SCA with U of AZ -Yuma.