Abstract

                                Most of the crops are watered through traditional methods of irrigation,which leads to wastage of water. The Crop Water Requirement (CWR)is necessary to design the irrigation system, which is the total quantityof water required for the crop from sowing to harvest.Optimizationof water applied to the crop is essential as the yields of the crop areadversely affected either by excess or deficit water supply. CROPWAT 8.0requires meteorological data as input such as maximum and minimumtemperatures, wind speed, relative humidity, and sunshine hours. The soiland crop data were also given as input for calculating the CWR of sweetcorn. The meteorological data of the past ten years was collected fromthe meteorological observatory, which is located at Agricultural CollegeFarm, Bapatla. The average values of the above-said data were calculatedfor ten years (2012-2021) to estimate the crop water requirement usingCROPWAT 8.0. The crop water requirement was estimated as 332 mmusing the CROPWAT 8.0 model. It was found to be minimal in the initialstages (15.60 mm/dec) and found to be maximum in the middle stages(64.80 mm/dec), and again at harvesting stage, it started declining (16.70mm/dec). CROPWAT 8.0 model gives more accurate amount of waterneeded for the crop, which in turn helps the crop growers to design theappropriate irrigation scheduling.

Key words : Crop Water Requirement, CROPWAT 8.0 model, sweet corn