Web based agricultural meteorology and crop evapotranspiration system

Abstract

Agrarian Service Centre plays an important role in sustainability of agriculture by ensuring the cultivation in the cultivatable land according to the acts of agricultural ministry, helping farmers in irrigation water management, guiding the cultivation program according to the annual cultivation schedule and to help farmers in obtaining loans from rural banks for agricultural production. In Agrarian Service Center in Vantharumoolai, they do not have any meteorology related system to help the farmers who are cultivating the crops in Batticaloa District. Due to this reason farmers were facing several problems related to their cultivation or agronomic practices throughout their cultivation period. Thus farmers cannot get high yield at the end of their cultivation in Batticaloa district. Therefore this web based system will provide daily and monthly updated meteorological information such as air temperature, relative humidity, rainfall pattern, evapotranspiration rate, crop water requirement. Unified Modelling Language (UML) was used to analysis and design the software. Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) which is a server-side scripting language was used to build the system and Apache has been used as the web server, meanwhile MySQL was used to handle databases. Since this is a web based system, it could be operated in Windows environment. The web based Agro Meteorological Information was designed to fulfil the user and system requirements. The system will help to farmers to do their agronomic practices according to the information provided by this system. Therefore farmers can get high yield and high agricultural productivity.