Abstract Irrigation agriculture in Ethiopia can be improved by applying appropriate irrigation levels. Since water scarcity is the major problem in Ethiopia, and farmers apply water without knowledge of the amount of water to be applied, appropriate irrigation levels for maize crops should be investigated in the central Gondar zone, Ethiopia. This paper aims to investigate the effect of deficit levels of irrigation on crop parameters and evaluate the AquaCrop model for its predictability potential of water productivity. The experiment has four levels of water application (Full Irrigation (100), 75, 50, and 25 of crop evapotranspiration) at 10?days of irrigation interval using Randomized Complete Block Design with three replications. Data collected in two experiments in the different seasons were soil moisture, canopy cover, biomass, and final yield. As high R2 (0.93) and Nash–Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) (0.91) values indicated, the model performed well in simulating canopy cover, above-ground biomass, and yield in all treatments except 25 full irrigation (FI) with prolonged water deficit. Grain yield measured from experiment 2 was within the range of 4.6 t/ha to 7.4 t/ha. Even though a high yield was found from FI, the measured water use efficiency was better in 75 FI treatment, indicating a potential for water-saving by this treatment than FI. Higher grain yield was observed for maize sown in January at experiment 1. This was attributed to the rainfall impact on the experiment since it was spring season in Ethiopia at which some rainfall in the region is pronounced. In addition, AquaCrop thoroughly underestimated the seasonal evapotranspiration values and the deviations were commonly bigger as stress levels increased. Therefore, AquaCrop can be used in the simulation of crop parameters, prediction of irrigated outputs, and assessing the impact of irrigation scheduling.
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