The general scientific objective of the IRRIMED project is the assessment of temporal and spatial variability of water consumption of irrigated agriculture under limited water resources conditions.

Measurements with sophisticated micro-meteorological equipments (e.g. : eddy-correlation method) are performed over representative mediterranean irrigated crops (wheat, barley, olive, orange, tomato,..) on 4 test sites in Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Syria.

The unique data set collected over the 4 test fields is fed into advanced deterministic soil-vegetation-atmosphere models (“reference”), to compute evapo-transpiration (ETR) at the plot level. Field observation are also used to adjust crop calendars and crop coefficients (Kcs) to the local conditions when applying the FAO method of ETR estimation. Ultimately the reference models are used to validate simpler models of crop growth and corresponding water consumption.The next step focuses on ‘spatialising’ the information, moving from point information to 2D using high resolution satellite images.

More : technical description

Each team of the participating South Mediterranean countries has selected a test site where field experiments are performed and the methods for evapo-transpiration mapping are tested. Click on a red circle of the map below to access a description of the test sites (Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia)