Identifying Challenges and Improvements for the Water My Yard Program

摘要

The WaterMyYard Program is an innovative new program launched in collaboration with the North Texas Municipal Water District (NTMWD) in May 2013. The program aims to help homeowners conserve water by providing them a weekly email with a recommended irrigation runtime rather than the amount of inches to apply. Homeowners create a profile by selecting on a district map the location of their residence and entering their sprinkler precipitation rate. However many homeowners do not know the precipitationrate of their sprinklers so an intuitive tool is used to allow them to pick their sprinkler type based on the sprinkler image, spacing and the manufacturer, thereby enabling manufacturers data be used to estimate precipitation rate. The program also incorporates local water restrictions such as days per week available for irrigation. Lessons from its pilot year have been incorporated into the WaterMyYard V2.0 program. This paper discusses the upgrades and challenges of the program as it evolves and becomes adopted by other. In 2014 we initiated a research protect to investigate the spatial variability of ET drivers in an urban environment in order to determine the minimum number of weather stations needed. This paper will also provide an update on thisproject.