Biography:

Prof. Ayman Suleiman is a Professor of Crop and Agricultural Water Modeling at the University of Jordan. He has over 15 years of experience in research, education and outreach in Crop and Agricultural Water Modeling. Prof. Suleiman is the most cited researcher in his department at the University of Jordan with a Google Scholar h-index of 14 and a number of citations of 682. He has specialized in crop simulation models and decision support systems. He has developed models to simulate soil water dynamics during evaporation and vertical and lateral drainage some of which have been incorporated into different crop models in the USA and Europe. Prof. Suleiman and a colleague in the United States of America developed ALARM which is a model to estimate actual evapotranspiration from remotely sensed data. Most of his research has been carried out with intensive international collaboration. He directed the Land, Water and Environment Department for two years. He led many national and international research and development projects, as well as participated in some of such projects nationally and internationally.

Abstract:

Presentation Title: A Modern Method for Computing Crop Water Requirements Abstract: The significance and need of fresh water is increasing dramatically by the day due to many factors such as population growth, improving standards of living for more people, climate change and droughts. Improving the agricultural water use efficiency would reduce the pressure on fresh water, because globally, agriculture uses about 69% of fresh water for irrigation. To have an outstanding agricultural water management a real-time assessment of the crop water requirements is needed. Some satellites provide data that can be used for estimating the real-time crop water requirements reasonably well. The Analytical Land Atmosphere Radiometer Model (ALARM) has been developed by Suleiman and Crago (2004) to estimate the crop water requirements from such satellite data. ALARM has been tested in Jordan, Syria and USA, for different crops and provided good estimates of crop water requirements. Last growing season, ALARM was evaluated for potatoes grown in the Jordan Valley on a lysimeter which is considered to be the most accurate method of measuring crop water requirements. LANDSAT 8 data were used in ALARM to compute the crop water requirements for the potatoes. The root mean square error between the ALRM estimates of crop water requirements and the measured ones during the growing season was 0.6 mm day-1. This indicated that ALARM performed well and can be used for crop water requirements estimation successfully.