Water and Soils
UC Irrigation and Water Management Publications
The UC ANR Catalog offers a number of practical guides for water management. These guides are available at:
Deficit irrigation of quality winegrapes
The UCCE booklet titled "Deficit Irrigation of Quality Winegrapes Using Micro-Irrigation Techniques" by Dr. Terry Prichard and other UCCE academics summarizes the fundamental aspects of vineyard irrigation management:
Deficit Irrigation of Quality Winegrapes Using Micro-Irrigation Techniques
DWR CIMIS weather data
The CA Dept. of Water Resources CIMIS program is a network of public weather stations that provide ETo data for irrigation scheduling purposes. The data is free, but you must sign up to use the service.
Data from individual stations is available at this website:
Irrigation water quality assessement
The following UN FAO publication has a large amount of detailed information on irrigation water quality and salinity management:
The following guidelines will be very useful to help with the interpretation of laboratory water analysis data for assessing the suitability of water for irrigation use in general:
Irrigation water analysis guidelines
Soil moisture monitoring
The following publication from the CSIRO in Australia provides very detailed information on a wide range of soil moisture measurement technologies. This was published in 2005; interested growers would be advised to investigate more recently developed technologies as well:
Soil Water Monitoring - 2nd Edition
Soil Survey information
The following two websites have Soil Survey information available online; this online information is replacing the older print versions of the Soil Survey documents:
California Soil Resource Lab at UC Davis:
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/soilweb-apps/
NRCS Web Soil Survey:
http://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/app/
FAO Irrigation and Drainage Paper 56
The FAO Irrigation and Drainage Paper 56 provides very detailed information on crop evapotranspiration. It is likely much too detailed for most growers, but can be a good general reference for understanding crop water requirements:
FAO Irrigation and Drainage Paper 56
California Water Atlas
The original California Water Atlas was published as a large format book in 1979. This amazingly detailed resource is now available online at the following website:
https://archive.org/details/The_California_Water_Atlas