Agricultural Water Management 151 (2015) 93–102 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Agricultural Water Management jou rn al hom ep age: www.elsevier.com/locate/agwat Development and assessment of a network of water meters and rain gauges for determining the water balance. New SCADA monitoring software M. Jiménez-Buendía a,∗ , L. Ruiz-Pe ˜ nalver b , J.A. Vera-Repullo a , D.S. Intrigliolo-Molina c , J.M. Molina-Martínez b a Electronic Technology Department, Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Cartagena 30202, Spain b Research Group in Agromotic and Marine Engineering, Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Cartagena 30203, Spain c Instituto Valenciano Investigaciones Agrarias (IVIA), Centro Desarrollo Agricultura Sostenible, Moncada 46113, Valencia, Spain a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Water consumption Potted crop Irrigation management Drainage measurement Transpiration a b s t r a c t Currently the scarcity of water resources in certain areas of the Mediterranean coast, specifically in southeastern Spain, make the irrigation efficiency a vital issue when it comes to cope with the high costs of water and contribute to an environmentally-sustainable and energy-efficient agriculture. The aim of this paper is to describe the design and assessment of a system to determine the water balance of an experimental planting of four rows of eight pots of vines (Vitis vinifera L. cv Bobal). This system consisted of a network of low cost water meters and rain gauges and a supervision, control and datalogging application (SCADA) running in a compact programmable automation controller. The water meters were installed at the beginning of the rows to measure the irrigation water. Due to the low flow rate in the drainage network and given the scarcity and high price of low-flow rate flowmeters, we decided to study the feasibility of using tipping bucket rain gauges to measure the drainage water. For this reason comprehensive calibration tests were conducted to ensure their proper operation under the desired flow rate taking into account possible tilt variations in its field deployment. Data from flow meters and rain gauges were processed in the compact controller that was responsible for monitoring and generating charts in real time providing an interface accessible from the Internet. The historical data were sent to a remote FTP to have a backup and make them available from anywhere through an Internet connection. The results obtained during the system operation showed that it provided acceptable accuracy in the determination of water balance. This makes it feasible for applications such as irrigation scheduling of potted crops at a lower cost than other systems that estimate crop evapotranspiration using climatic data such as Eddy-correlation and Bowen-ratio stations. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The agromotic systems to manage water and energy resources are becoming wide spreading in the agri-food sector, providing a response to the needs of control and automation of production processes (El-Gafy and El-Ganzori, 2012; Faye et al., 1998; Wellens et al., 2013). These systems are used to increase the efficiency of such processes, contributing to improve their performance and minimizing potential energy and production losses that may arise ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 968 338888; fax: +34 968 32 5345. E-mail address: manuel.jimenez@upct.es (M. Jiménez-Buendía). therein. In most cases, the primary objective is to minimize the consumption of water to obtain maximum production. This is critical in areas such as the southeast of Spain, where the cost of water is so high that it could compromise the viability of farms. In addition, reducing water consumption implies reducing energy costs of pumping. There are different approaches to manage irrigation saving water and energy. In most cases the objective is to determine crop evapotranspiration to work out how much water the crop needs (Allen et al., 2011). One option is to use the reference evapo- transpiration (ET O ) and other climate data from nearby stations for irrigation scheduling (Álvarez et al., 2004; Hunsaker et al., 2011; Ma et al., 2006; Thysen and Detlefsen, 2006; Xu et al., 2011). In developed countries there are organizations, usually public, that http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2014.11.013 0378-3774/© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.