Typical Meteorological Year for Villa Mercedes, San Luis: Water balance simulation and irrigation calendar tool.

Abstract

Key objective of this research was creating the typical meteorological year (TMY) for Villa Mercedes (San Luis) using 1968-2018 climate series. The province of San Luis belongs to the semi-arid region. This region presents a water deficit for agricultural production throughout the year. The used of irrigation systems of the province of San Luis has increased 3.5 times between 2002 and 2013. The application of mathematical models assists farmers to make decisions about irrigation management. The time and amount of water to be applied, can be more accurate using the typical meteorological year. TMY consists of 12 months selected from individual years and concatenated to form a complete year. In this work, the climatic data (from 1968 to 2018) were obtained of two weather station (EEA-INTA Villa Mercedes: 33°39'06.7"S 65°25'11.6" W and FICA-UNSL: 33º64'02.9''S 65º44'66.18''W). The months selected were chosen from statistics determined by the following indices commonly used for irrigation scheduling: reference evapotranspiration (ETo), rainfall (P), and minimum (Tmin) and maximum temperature (Tmax) (Domínguez et al., 2013a). The use of the typical meteorological year is of interest when managing irrigated areas, since it can be used to irrigation schedule forecasting and estimate the water balance.