Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons^™

Evaporation Reduction Potential In An Undisturbed Soil Irrigated With Surface Drip And Sand Tube Irrigation, Masoud Meshkat, Richard C. Warner, Stephen R. Workman

Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications

The efficiency of drip irrigation is highly dependent on evaporation losses occurring from the constantly saturated soil beneath emitters. Advent of subsurface drip irrigation is in part an approach to curb this inefficiency. An irrigation method, Sand Tube Irrigation (STI), is proposed to increase the efficiency of “Normal” surface applied drip Irrigation (NI method) on permanent tree crops without the need for burying the irrigation tubing. The sand tube consists of removing a soil core beneath the emitter and filling the void with coarse sand. A weighing lysimeter was constructed in the laboratory and instrumented to directly measure temporal evaporation …