ESTIMATION OF EVAPOTRANSPIRATION, CROP COEFFICIENTS AND WATER PRODUCTIVITY OF COCOA TREE
crop evapotranspiration, soil evaporation, basal coefficient
The cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao) is a plant of high socioeconomic and environmental importance. One of the fundamental criteria for adopting irrigation management is the daily determination of crop evapotranspiration (ETc), which comprises both the quantification of evaporation (E) on the soil surface, and transpiration (T), important for calculating estimates of water needs where the culture develops. Environmental characteristics substantially influence the evaporation of water on the soil surface, and for this reason there is a need for studies to quantify the evaporation of water from the soil and plant transpiration for the adequate management of an irrigation system. The purpose of this work aims to estimate the evapotranspiration of the cocoa crop, and the simple crop coefficients (Kc), soil evapotranspiration coefficient (ke) and the basal coefficient (kcb) according to the FAO-56 methodology. The study is being conducted at Fazenda Estrela Couvre III located in the municipality of Vitória do Xingu, 12 km from Altamira-PA. The experimental area has two agrometereological towers, in each treatment, which monitor the main climatic elements: temperature and relative humidity, global solar radiation, wind speed and direction, precipitation. Data collection is performed automatically at 10-minute intervals and stored in a Campbell Scientific® model CR1000 Datalogger. The accumulated evapotranspiration from September/23 to December/24 in the irrigated and rainfed treatments was 335 mm and 185 mm. The average value of soil evaporation (Ke) found was 0.34 in the irrigated area and 0.36 in the rainfed area. In relation to the basal coefficient (Kcb), an average value was found for the irrigated and rainfed treatments of 0.53 and 0.35, respectively. While Kc presented average values of 0.82 and 0.47 for the irrigated and rainfed treatments