Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2015NE270B

Climate Variability and a Decision Support Tool for Optimizing Yields with Limited Water Available for Irrigation

Institute: Nebraska
Year Established: 2015 Start Date: 2015-03-01 End Date: 2016-02-29
Total Federal Funds: $16,499 Total Non-Federal Funds: $56,731

Principal Investigators: Jane Okalebo, Kenneth Hubbard

Project Summary: Nebraska's climate is highly variable and is expected to change in the future with anthropogenic global warming, resulting in warmer spring and summer temperatures coupled with more erratic rainfall events. This has strong implications for agriculture in the region, yet it is not clear that current modeling and decision-support tools are adequate to address these looming changes and provide planning, mitigation and adaptation strategies. To address climate change and its implications to irrigated corn production in Nebraska, robust decision support tools are very crucial. The sensitivity of corn to water stress during different growth periods/stages will be incorporated into irrigation scheduling with limited water resources. Since crops are not equally sensitive to growth in all stages of their development, multiplicative empirical models will be incorporated that will facilitate analysis of deficit irrigation strategies and their impacts on crop yields thereby offering a means of sustaining high corn yields in the future in lieu of imminent climate changes.