Estimation of Paddy Rice Crop Coefficients for FAO Penman-Monteith and Modified Penman Method

In 1998, Food and Agriculture Organization addressed that FAO Modified Penman method possibly over-estimates consumptive use of water comparing to the measured reference crop evapotranspiration (PET) and Penman-Monteith method can be better choice for accurate PET estimation. Nevertheless it is still difficult to find research efforts about paddy rice crop coefficient for Penman-Monteith method. This study aims to estimate paddy rice crop coefficients for Penman-Monteith and FAO modified Penman methods in the manner of comparing two equations. To estimate the crop coefficients, measured evapotranspiration data during 1982-1986 and 1995-1997 were used. The average Penman-Monteith crop coefficients ranged from 0.78 to 1.58 for translated paddy rice and from 0.87 to 1.74 for flood-direct seeded paddy rice. The average FAO Modified Penman crop coefficients ranged from 0.65 to 1.35 for translated paddy rice and from 0.70 to 1.58 for flood-direct seeded paddy rice.