The SudMed Program and the Joint International Laboratory TREMA: A Decade of Water Transfer Study in the Soil-plant-atmosphere System over Irrigated Crops in Semi-arid Area

This paper presents an overview of a decade (2002-2012) of studies performed on Soil-Plant-Atmosphere processes, in semi-arid areas (Haouz plain, Morocco). In this period, fifteen in-situ experiments on the dominant irrigated crops were performed, controlling the fluxes exchanged between land surface and atmosphere. The results showed that the physically based SVATs (ICARE, SiSPAT and ISBA) provided the best estimates of surface fluxes. For operational purposes, the FAO-56 approach and SAMIR Software (Satellite Monitoring for Irrigation) give a good estimate of evapotranspiration at field and regional scales, respectively. Finally, thermal infrared data were used in conjunction with SVATs to investigate the possibility of estimating the quantity of irrigation water.