Theodor Bughici

SSS Soil System Sciences

The 2019 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Theodor Bughici for the poster/PICO entitled:

Field Crop Irrigation–Multi-Objective Optimization and Sensitivity to Weather Forecast Accuracy (Bughici, T.; Tas, E.; Fredj, E.; Lazarovitch, N.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Theodor Bughici is a Ph.D. student at the Ben-Gurion University Department of Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands in Sede Boqer. His main research interest is precision agriculture.
His poster at the EGU 2019 presented a global sensitivity analysis of a field crop model to the precision of evapotranspiration forecasting. Numerical weather forecasting capabilities have advanced rapidly in recent years but are still far from perfect and may cause imprecise irrigation leading to either loss of crop yield or loss of water and agrochemicals when used for irrigation scheduling.
The goal of the work was to assess what is a “good enough” evapotranspiration forecast. This was accomplished by analysing two irrigation case studies and performing a global sensitivity analysis of the optimal irrigation management with respect to different crop, soil and weather parameters and with a changing range of evapotranspiration prediction bias. This method can be extended to a variety of case studies and more complex crop models.