Abstract: Surge Flow Irrigation, originated in USA, is a kind of advanced water-saving irrigation. For its lower costing, it suits for arid and sem-i arid regions with undeveloped economy. In order to provide the optimum parameters and their combinations for Surge Flow Irrigation program, Saint-Venant equation (the full hydrodynamic Model) was often applied to describe water flow on open channel and develop models. This equation is, however, very complicit to be solved. In this paper, a new simple and accurate model for Surge Flow Border Irrigation is presented, based on the analytical border irrigation model originally developed by Yu and Singh (1989). (1) The new model is a sem-i theory and sem-i experience model, in which water advance phase is imitated by the implicit function and solved by iteration, and water recession phase is described by the experience equation. (2) A comparison of the values calculated by the proposed method with observed values shows that the average relative errors for water advance phase and recession phase were only 8. 2% and 4.6%, respectively. Reasonable prediction results, therefore, can be obtained by using the proposed method. (3) Field experiments were conducted in sem-i arid cinnamon soil region, western Liaoning province. On the basis of property of cinnamon soil intermittent infiltration and flow in fields, by using the proposed model, the irrigation quality was predicted and the optimum parameter combination determined to guide farmers in local region for water-saving irrigation management.

Key words: sem-iarid region, surge flow irrigation, border irrigation model