Investigating the effect of Basil planting date on AquaCrop’s normalized water productivity

Normalized water productivity is one of the AquaCrop model inputs, which simulates the performance of the biomass. This parameter has been considered to be constant for each crop in Aquacrop model. As the planting date affects the crop yield, this question is raised whether the planting date affects the normalized water productivity parameter or no? The proposed crop was Basil which was planted in summer 2017 in the Field of Abourihan University of Tehran in Pakdasht area at three different times (three treatments T1, T2 and T3) with 10 days intervalsThe biomass and normalized water productivity were measured 24 times during the growth period of each treatment. Normalized water productivity for T1, T2 and T3 treatments were estimated 11.2, 13.7 and 13.9 g/m2, respectively. The coefficient of determination and the root mean square error were determined to be 0.99 and less than 14% respectively, using validation data. The difference among the above numbers indicates that the planting date is effective on the amount of normalized water productivity.