(10-21-2021, 07:54 PM)Jags Wrote:

(10-21-2021, 04:18 PM)Senor Fantastico Wrote: OpenET launched today. 

Everyone keep calm!

Only halfway skimmed an article about it.  From what I gather, they’re trying to Figure out where the water goes and such as far as evaporation and such.  Find better ways to use it and so forth. Something about helping farmers.  I skimmed because it seemed to be a well, duh! thing. And the big words were bigger than what I was taught in my dumb classes.  Water evaporation happens faster during peak of the day and not so much at night.  What does this do or can do to help one like yourself? Or does it just give you new “satellite blues”?  Haha , couldn’t help adding that song in there.

ET is a measurement of the transfer of water vapor from plant tissue to the atmosphere. I guess you can think of it like a plant sweating. It's a method used to measure both plant water needs and plant water use. 

Currently, there's 3ish good methods to determine water needs. You can measure the water in the soil with a tensiometer, crush green plant tissue and see how much water you can extract from it, or use ET measurement. I use ET myself because doing math is a lot cheaper than tensiometers and pressure bombs. 

To do that, UC Davis keeps something like a 1 inch tall plot of grass and measures its water use by weighing it in a lysimeter. That gives you a Reference ET. Then I would need to calculate a coefficient based on the crop I grow, canopy size, growth stage, a bunch of junk. 

That will give me a crop ET that I can use to determine how many gallons either an acre or per vine to apply. Then I take a reading of how many gallons per minute my pump is putting out and can figure out how long it needs to run to apply the correct amount of gallons per vine. Just a lot of time consuming math and conversions.

This program gives a daily output of specific ET needs. It already knows I grow grapes and it'll just tell me each day, put on 6 inches of water dummy. So it does help make life easier. I've already used it just today to determine my irrigation system has terrible uniformity. I can also see the sandy streaks in the field because they're dryer, kinda crazy. 

But... we also have quite a few water laws going into effect in January. So the other side of this program is EVERYONE can can see to the inch how much water every other person is using on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. 

Personally, I've been under the current limit for a few years so I'm mostly good with it, but there's a lot of "water barons" that probably aren't going to be very happy next year.

Also, I think it's just kinda cool that they can measure how much water you're using from space by what the plants sweat off.

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