Creating a Landscape Water Budget Calculator for a Desert City

New Mexico’s most populous city, Albuquerque relies on ground water as the main source of water for irrigating urban landscapes.  Albuquerque’s annual rainfall is 226 mm (8.9 inches).  The main source of water for the urban sector of Albuquerque is underground water.  Albuquerque is likely to suffer water supply crises by 2025 because water extractions from underground aquifers exceed recharge rates.  Knowledge of residential landscape water requirements has the potential to help residents use landscape irrigation more efficiently.  The objective of this study was to create a scientifically-based water budget web interface for the desert city of Albuquerque.  The web interface allows residents to estimate their monthly or yearly landscape water budget based on the landscaped area, areas of vegetation types, or landscape species composition.  Residents are able to view their parcel property image and digitize water consumptive landscape features which are subsequently used to estimate water budgets.  Length of growing season, annual temperature and growing degree days were used to transfer landscape plant coefficients from the California landscape irrigation guide and data from New Mexico State University.  Water budget calculations can use either current (monthly) or historical (monthly and yearly) evapotranspiration values.  In addition, monthly and yearly historical reference evapotranspiration values for El Niño, La Niña and Neutral signals are available and allow the water budget to be modified based on the current year signal.  This web interface may be used as a tool to conserve water in the desert city of Albuquerque because residents can use the web tool to determine their landscape irrigation needs.  Also, municipalities can use the web tool as a planning interface to estimate water budget for new developments.