%0 Journal Article
%T Sediment Transport Model for a Surface Irrigation System
%A Damodhara R. Mailapalli
%A Narendra S. Raghuwanshi
%A Rajendra Singh
%J Applied and Environmental Soil Science
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/957956
%X Controlling irrigation-induced soil erosion is one of the important issues of irrigation management and surface water impairment. Irrigation models are useful in managing the irrigation and the associated ill effects on agricultural environment. In this paper, a physically based surface irrigation model was developed to predict sediment transport in irrigated furrows by integrating an irrigation hydraulic model with a quasi-steady state sediment transport model to predict sediment load in furrow irrigation. The irrigation hydraulic model simulates flow in a furrow irrigation system using the analytically solved zero-inertial overland flow equations and 1D-Green-Ampt, 2D-Fok, and Kostiakov-Lewis infiltration equations. Performance of the sediment transport model was evaluated for bare and cropped furrow fields. The results indicated that the sediment transport model can predict the initial sediment rate adequately, but the simulated sediment rate was less accurate for the later part of the irrigation event. Sensitivity analysis of the parameters of the sediment module showed that the soil erodibility coefficient was the most influential parameter for determining sediment load in furrow irrigation. The developed modeling tool can be used as a water management tool for mitigating sediment loss from the surface irrigated fields. 1. Introduction Surface irrigation is a widely used farming system for crop production as it requires less skilled labour and involves less operational cost. Surface irrigation systems contributed to about 90% of the world¡¯s crop land irrigation promoting furrow irrigation as the main application method [1]. However, poor design and management, nonuniformity of water application, and over-irrigation featured in surface irrigation are responsible for inefficient irrigation, leading to wastage of water, water logging, salinization, and pollution of surface and ground water resources. Irrigated agriculture is under serious risk due to substantial soil losses from highly erodible soils [2¨C4]. The sediment transport in an irrigation season varies with the number of previous irrigations, flow rate, soil type, field slope, and field length [5, 6]. Berg and Carter [2] reported annual losses of sediments ranging from 1 to 141£¿Mg£¿ha£¿1 in Southern Idaho. Koluvek et al. [7] measured 0.2 to 50£¿Mg£¿ha£¿1 of soil loss per season in Washington and 1 to 22£¿Mg£¿ha£¿1 per irrigation in Wyoming. Brown et al. [8] observed a maximum sediment loss of 79.5£¿kg per furrow for 4% slope and 26.4£¿kg per furrow for 1.6% slope in an irrigation event. Mailapalli et
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/aess/2013/957956/