Software application for calculating solar radiation and equivalent evaporation in mobile devices

• In this paper, a new application for mobile devices of last generation is presented.
• This permits to estimate water needs of the crops, data to validate agricultural weather stations, to decide about where to place photovoltaic panels, etc.
• The application makes use of GPS and Google Maps tool. It is executed in Android, being compatible with almost all versions.
• The tool permits to send the information of interest by SMS, Bluetooth, e-mail, social networks, etc.

In the agriculture sector, some tasks such as to estimate the water needs of the crops, to validate the data supplied by agricultural weather stations, or to decide the best place for solar water heating systems, photovoltaic panels, etc., involve the use of real data about the extraterrestrial solar radiation or the equivalent radiation and evaporation of the place of interest. These parameters are calculated making use of the geographic position of the place under study. Last generation of mobile phones, the so-called smartphones, and other mobile devices, such us tablets, are endowed with the Global Positioning System tool, which permits the geographic position with just a click. A software application that makes use of this tool could be used to calculate those parameters in-situ, improving the way in which the farmers and agricultural technicians work today. This paper presents a powerful software application for mobile devices that calculates, stores, and sends to others, those parameters related with the position and relative distance sun-earth: the extraterrestrial solar radiation, incident radiation on earth, number of hours of sun, equivalent evaporation, etc. This new tool is an improved version of RaGPS, a software application developed in a previous work for mobile devices with Windows Operating System. The application presented in this paper is executed in Android Operating System, compatible with Android 2.3 and latest versions. It has remarkable details like elements in the screen designed to be compatible with tablets and other mobile devices; new methods for detecting and adding coordinates, through Google Maps tool; the height of a coordinate obtained by a web service; graphics included for increasing application usability, options to send the information of interest, not only using text messages, but also via Bluetooth, e-mail, social networks, etc.