The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs is supporting the Irrigation Management Information System (IMIS) project to expand and include additional activities.  The IMIS activities include hosting Middle Eastern researchers from Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  These visiting researchers are currently located at the USDA-ARS-Water Management Research Lab, Parlier, CA.  The Middle Eastern researchers are working together with ARS scientists to complete a one-year program in the U.S., and continue to cooperate during the second and third years, when the cooperating researchers return to their respective countries to carry out research and other local and regional research activities.  The researchers are studying improved water management techniques including determination of crop water requirements, irrigation scheduling, and micro-irrigation system operation

Research will focus on the following:

• Develop seasonal crop coefficients for high-value tree, vine, and vegetable crops such as peach, grape, broccoli, lettuce, pepper, onion, and garlic; 
• Evaluate and modify equations (if necessary) to accurately estimate reference evapotranspiration from meteorological data (e.g., the Penman and Penman-Monteith equations.); 
• Estimate crop water use using pan evaporation; 
• Develop irrigation practices that optimize timing and placement of water and nutrients, increase crop productivity, and limit irrigation drainage and loss of soil resources; 
• Evaluate irrigation-scheduling models using data collected during the research and modify as needed to work in the Middle East; 
• Evaluate yield response under field conditions irrigating with poor quality water and develop a production function to describe the results;
• Study to focus on prediction of crop water use, using weather data to predict a reference evapotranspiration (ET) coupled with crop coefficients, the latter being developed using weighing lysimeter/soil water balance techniques in the cooperating countries

Israeli Visiting Researcher