2015 journal article
Residential Irrigation Water Use in the Central Piedmont of North Carolina. I: Measured Use and Water Requirements
JOURNAL OF IRRIGATION AND DRAINAGE ENGINEERING, 141(4).
AbstractIrrigation is the most common and standard practice for maintaining turfgrass and landscape plants in residential settings. The main objective of this study was to quantify the residential irrigation water use in Cary, North Carolina. A subobjective was to develop distributions of monthly reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and gross irrigation requirements (GIRs) for the area using long-term weather data. As part of the subobjective, an investigation was performed to compare daily measured solar radiation with two empirical methods of estimating solar radiation (Rs). The goal of this investigation was to determine the relative accuracy of these methods and to evaluate the impact of using Rs estimates in the computation of ETo and GIR for the Raleigh-Durham area, where Cary is located. Irrigation water use data from 2005 to 2007 for 120 randomly sampled residences were evaluated. The average lawn area of the sampled residences was 713 m2. None of the sampled households used drip irrigation. A nega...