The Smartirrigation Cotton App with a National Footprint

The SmartIrrigation Cotton App (Cotton App) is an irrigation scheduling tool which was released in 2014 The model uses a check-book approach to estimate when available soil moisture has been depleted by adding precipitation and irrigation to available soil moisture and subtracting FAO-56 ET adjusted by a crop coefficient from it.  Until now, the Cotton App was geographically limited to Georgia and Florida because it relied on weather station networks in these states for meteorological data.  This presentation will describe a new version of the Cotton App which will have a national footprint.  The new version uses meteorological data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) to run the water balance model and is called the NWS Cotton App.  Using national data sets allows the App to expand its currently limited footprint to the entire Cotton Belt.  Specifically, the NWS Cotton App extracts FAO-56 ET, precipitation, minimum daily temperature, and maximum daily temperature from NWS digital data sets.  This new version will have the several new features.  A switch will allow users to select between state mesonets or NWS data for precipitation.  The precipitation selection will also determine the source of ET (weather station data or FRET).  Regional crop coefficient curves will be used to account for regional differences in climatic conditions.  A crop coefficient curve is assigned to each state based on the region in which the state is located. Curves are selected based on geographic coordinates of the field.  The NWS Cotton App will be available for the 2017 growing season.