AquaCrop

Author

Gabrielle De Lannoy (gabrielle.delannoy@kuleuven.be) and Dirk Raes

Description

AquaCrop is a crop growth model developed by the Land and Water Division of FAO to address food security and to assess the effect of environment and management on crop production. AquaCrop simulates yield response to water of herbaceous crops, and is particularly suited to address conditions where water is a key limiting factor in crop production. When designing the model, an optimum balance between simplicity, accuracy and robustness was pursued. To be widely applicable AquaCrop uses only a relatively small number of explicit parameters and mostly-intuitive input-variables requiring simple methods for their determination. On the other hand, the calculation procedures is grounded on basic and often complex biophysical processes to guarantee an accurate simulation of the response of the crop in the plant-soil system.

https://www.fao.org/aquacrop/en/

Scientific articles

de Roos, S., De Lannoy, G.J.M., Raes, D. (2021). Performance analysis of regional AquaCrop (v6.1) biomass and surface soil moisture simulations using satellite and in situ observations. Geoscientific Model Development, 14(12), 7309-7328, 10.5194/gmd-14-7309-2021.

Busschaert, L., de Roos, S., Thiery, W., Raes, D., De Lannoy, G.J.M. (2022). Net irrigation requirement under different climate scenarios using AquaCrop over Europe. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 26, 3731–3752, 10.5194/hess-26-3731-2022.

Technical information

Operating system(s): Windows, Lunix, MacOS

Licence: Open source

Output(s): Detailed data on water state and flux variables, crop variables

Export format(s): ASCII

User Manual: https://www.fao.org/aquacrop/resources/referencemanuals/en/