Variations of crop coefficient and its influencing factors in an arid advective cropland of northwest China.

Understanding the variation and magnitude of crop coefficient ( K_c) is important for accurate determination of crop evapotranspiration and water use. In this study, we calculated K_c in an irrigated maize field with ground mulching by eddy covariance evapotranspiration measurements during the whole growing periods in 2009 and 2010 in an arid region of northwest China. A semi-empirical practical approach for estimating K_c was proposed by introducing the dynamic fraction of canopy cover and incorporating the effect of leaf senescence as a function of days after sowing. The contribution of arid advection of sensible heat resulting from irrigation to K_c and the response of K_c to canopy conductance ( G_c) were investigated. The averaged values of daily K_c were lower than typical values obtained previously without mulching due to decreasing effect of mulching on K_c, with 0.82 and 0.80 for the 2 years, respectively. The maximum average K_c occurred at the heading stage, with 1.21 and 1.04 for the 2 years, respectively. The difference of K_c was attributed to the difference of leaf area index. The semi-empirical practical approach could well estimate the variations of K_c, thus could be a robust and useful tool for the practical users and water managers. The contributions to daily K_c from the arid advection were 4.4-28.0% of the measured K_c. The G_c had stronger control on daily K_c at the early and later stages than at the middle stage. When G_c, leaf area index and relative soil extractable water were lower than the respective threshold values of 20 mm s⁻¹, 3.0 m² m⁻² and 0.5, the daily K_c increased significantly with the increase of the three factors, and almost remained constant when the three factors were beyond the threshold values. These results are helpful for quantifying contributions of individual factors to K_c, and subsequently improving water management practices according to K_c. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]