December 6 – Prairie View A&M University College of Agriculture and Human Sciences Postdoctoral Researchers Almoutaz Elhassan, Ph.D., and Atikur Rahman, Ph.D., recently partnered with the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB) to install a weather station in Northwest Victoria, Texas.

This collaboration is a part of an Interagency Agreement with TWDB, which was established in 2018. The agreement is to install six weather stations that are part of TexMesonet, as part of the USDA, NIFA funded project, “Real-Time Site-Specific Irrigation Scheduling Tools for Agricultural Crops and Urban Landscape in Texas Using a Mobile Web App.”

The weather station will measure different weather parameters, such as rainfall, temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture, etc. Based on those observed weather parameters, you can calculate reference evapotranspiration to estimate the crop water requirement for irrigation.

Ripendra Awal, Ph.D., and Ali Fares, Ph.D., lead this project. Ram Ray, Ph.D., and Nelson Daniels, Ph.D., also are part of the team and serve as co-principal investigators. TWDB operates and maintains the network. Data of the network are readily available for users. IrrigWise, an online irrigation scheduling tool developed by Awal and Fares, uses TexMesonet and other networks for irrigation of crops and urban landscape across Texas.

The research team uses IrrigWise, as an irrigation tool for urban and rural areas. The IrrigWise will be made available to the public after the validation phase.

For more information on this article contact:

Ripendra Awal, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
riawal@pvamu.edu
(936) 261-5092