Abstract
Water requirements of tomato planted in the Umudike area of Abia State, Southeastern Nigeria was estimated based on a 11-year meteorological data of the National Root Crop Research Institute, Umudike, using Penman’s equation. Results obtained showed that seasonal crop evapotranspiration (ETcrop) of tomato planted on 1 March and harvested in July (early season) was 387.10 mm, whereas that sown on 1 August and harvested in December (late season) was 353.31 mm. The results indicated that water requirement for early season tomato was higher than the late season tomato. Supplementary irrigation requirements were estimated at 11.52 mm during the initial growth stage of early-season tomato and 126.49 mm during the productive and maturity stages of late-season tomato. It is therefore recommended that the early season planting be done at a time when crop water requirements of the initial growth stage and reproductive and maturity stages of tomato in Umudike can be met by effective rainfall for economic reasons. However, provision for supplementary irrigation should be made during November and December for lateseason tomato production.
Keywords: Crop Water Requirement, Penman’s equation, Season, Tomato, Evapotranspiration.
Author name(s):
Ndifreke Stanislaus Udo,
Independent Researcher in Soil Physics, Conservation and Environmental Sustainability, Uyo, Nigeria.
Ndianabasi Victor Afangide,
School of Geosciences, Yangtze University, Jingzhou, Hubei, China.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23149992
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.