The dates are among the world's oldest cultivated fruits, widespread throughout North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Asia. Over the last century, distribution has extended to the United States, South Africa, India and Australia. In general, the geographical distribution of commercial date production is limited to areas that can be described as arid and semi-arid and where there is abundant water supply. The best date palm growing regions are characterized by long, hot, dry summers with minimal summer/fall rainfall. In other words, long, hot and arid growing season is required for date palm growth and to develop, mature and ripen fruits. Early maturing varieties such as Mejhool and Deglet Noor in the California low desert, require about 6,500 degree-days of heat units from flowering to fruit ripening.
The main goal of the designed CSIS cloud IoT solution is water management of date palm by effificiently controlling the subsurface irrigation system through employing the marvelous capabilities of cloud computing and the IoT. Implicitly, the designed CSIS can monitor various parameters and automatically notify the user in case of emergency by either sending an email message or a short message. It controls the subsurface irrigation system for date palm to apply the optimum amount of water needed by the date palm tree. It can be considered as a sensor-based subsurface irrigation scheduling (S-BIS). It schedules the water amount to be applied for the date palm on variable periods based on the measures received from the sensors. The system gets the measurements from the sensors, uploads these measures to the ThingSpeak cloud platform, does cloud analysis, makes decisions, and applies decisions to the subsurface irrigation system. Our CSIS is shown in Figure 4. The designed system makes irrigation decisions based on direct measurement of volumetric water content (VWC), while monitoring other factors such as air temperature, relative humidity (RH), solar radiation, wind speed, and water flflow rate per minute.
