Abstract:
Accurate estimation of crop consumptive water use in the State of Wyoming is a key component for making decisions in irrigational policy and allocations of water and administration of water rights. State water resources managers utilize crop consumptive water use data to monitor and guide farmers and make a sustainable future plan and decision. The proposed project will utilize the best available local weather station data along with Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) data to accurately represent spatial variation of weather pattern for the State of Wyoming. Several GIS-based tools (ArcInfo model, ArcGIS extension, and web-based analysis tool) would be developed, and it will help water resources managers as well as local water users to make operational decisions in an easier and faster fashion. The resulting products would be daily, monthly and seasonal state-wide reference ET, crop ET, and CIR at 800 m x 800 m resolution and user-friendly analysis tools for the calculation of mean ET and CIR for any area of interest within the State of Wyoming. The software would allow the state water resources managers to calculate the crop ET of a specific crop or all the crops in a given County of interest or irrigation project in any given River Basin within the State of Wyoming.