Eureka! Institutional Repository

Abstract The necessity to cover the needs of the continuous planet’s growing population in combination with the upcoming increase in planet’s mean temperature due to climate change effect makes the transition from traditional farming to precision farming mandatory. A basic aspect of the precision farming is the precision irrigation. In the framework of this study we examined the possible use of the weather arithmetic model TAPM and the agronomic crop growth model AquaCrop as potential tools in cotton plant irrigation scheduling process. For this purpose, an experiment was carried out in a 2 ha field at Magiko village in Xanthi province. During the experiment the canopy cover, the dry aboveground biomass, the soil water content, the seed cotton yield and the weather conditions were measured. The results showed that the TAPM could predict with precision the temperature (r = 0.95) and the evapotranspiration (r = 0.98) but not the rain height (r = 0.6). AquaCrop model simulated with satisfactory accuracy the canopy cover, biomass, soil water content and final seed cotton yield but derived unrealistic results regarding cotton root development.