Monitoring of water and nitrate leaching in an almond orchard

The quality of groundwater is specifically vulnerable in irrigated agricultural lands such as in California and many other (semi-) arid regions of the world. The regular application of nitrogen fertilizers with irrigation water is likely responsible for the increase in nitrate concentrations of groundwater resources such as in CA's main agricultural areas in the Salinas Valley and the Tulare Lake Basin. Since groundwater contamination regulations are going to be implemented, improved fertigation practices may become an essential part of CA farming operations. Therefore, we conducted a field study in an almond orchard located in Lost Hills, CA which provides critical information on the movement of water and nutrients through the soil under variable soil moisture conditions. Water balance and Darcy equation were two approaches used to estimate the leaching in this study. Given the amount of applied irrigation water using flowmeter, water lost through evapotranspiration measured by Eddy-Covariance tower, changes in soil water storage using neutron probe data, and precipitation data provided by a nearby CIMIS station, we applied water balance to estimate the amount of leaching water. In the other hand, coupled deep tensiometers were used to calculate the head gradient below the root zone, thereby estimating the leaching flux with Darcy equation for known hydraulic conductivity of layer between two tensiometers. Although, the cumulative amount of leaching estimated by water balance were in the same order of magnitude as what was estimated using Darcy method, the uncertainties and different cumulative trend observed in each method suggest further evaluation of collected data and also looking for an alternative method which could reduce the observed uncertainty.