Combining hydro-meteorological models and the knowledge of irrigation turn it is possible to know in advance soil moisture content and expected cumulated precipitation for irrigation management and water control from 1 up to 30 days as forecast horizon.
In order to value soil moisture conditions, probabilistic forecasts are compared with two thresholds: one is the water surplus coinciding with the field capacity of the soil and the other is the stress threshold where below this point the crop begins to suffer the lack of water. According to Baroni et al., [17], this latter is calculated as follow (1):
RAW = p · TAW (1)
where RAW is the Readily Available Water, TAW is the Total Available Water and p is coefficient depending on the crop and climatic parameters which can be assumed equal to 0.5 for maize crop in the Livraga field; hence the Eq.1 becomes:
Stress threshold = field capacity – 0.5 · (field capacity – wilting point) (2)
Since this soil has been characterized as silt loam, the two values are 0.23 and 0.33, respectively for
the stress and water surplus threshold.