Title: Development of novel embedded system for evapotranspiration estimation in Central India

Authors: Vijaya S. Rahangadale; A.K. Mittra

Addresses: Department of Electronics Engineering, Maonharbhai Patel Institute of Engineering and Technology, Kudwa, Gondia, Maharashtra-441614, India ' Department of Electronics Engineering, Maonharbhai Patel Institute of Engineering and Technology, Kudwa, Gondia, Maharashtra-441614, India

Abstract: Automation in the agriculture domain has gained importance due to the need of effective water utilisation. Developed countries have centralised irrigation management information systems, which uses a network of automated weather stations across the country to record real-time data of solar radiation, soil temperature, air temperature, vapour pressure, wind speed, relative humidity, and precipitation. This data helps in estimating evapotranspiration (ET) which is further used for irrigation scheduling. Developing and under developed countries do not have networked weather stations, hence the estimation of ET becomes difficult, time consuming and cost prohibitive. Such countries have an indirect method using meteorological data as the only alternative. This problem leads to a high importance of finding cost effective ways to estimate ET using real time data. A major challenge is to collect weather data. This paper describes a proposed embedded system for the estimation of reference ET for irrigation control. The Penman-Monteith equation is used to compute the reference ET. The real time weather parameter has been recorded for the computation and the result has been compared with the Hargreaves ET equation for missing climatic data. The designed system is cost prohibitive and comparatively simple.

Keywords: embedded systems; irrigation control; data logger; agriculture automation; evapotranspiration estimation; India; weather data; climatic data.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIT.2015.075924

International Journal of Instrumentation Technology, 2015 Vol.1 No.4, pp.270 - 281

Received: 08 Dec 2014
Accepted: 24 Mar 2015
Published online: 16 Apr 2016 *

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