Evaluation and Sensitivity Analysis of AquaCrop to Simulate Sugar Beet Yield under Water Stress in Shahrekord

This research was conducted to evaluate AquaCrop model to simulate sugar beet yield and water use efficiency (WUE). In this research, data from two sugar beet cultivars were used at Shahrekord Agricultural Research Center. Treatments were consisted of water deficit (in five levels: E0: 100%, E1: 85%, E2: 70%, E3: 55%, and E4: 30%) in different growth stages (T1: initial, T2: T2: mid-season, and T3: late season). AquaCrop had a low sensitivity to change in PWP moisture and minimum temperature values and high sensitivity to change in crop coefficient for transpiration values. The yield results of RMSE and NRMSE were 0.57 and 0.11 ton.ha-1, respectively. The yield results for two statistics criteria (EF and d) were 0.62 and 0.99, respectively. Evaluation of AquaCrop revealed that this model had good accuracy for simulation of sugar beet yield and WUE.