Surface water flow over an irrigated field can be described by the principles of conservation of mass (continuity) and conservation of momentum. For a prismatic channel, continuity and momentum, which are often termed the Saint-Venant equations, can be expressed in the singledimensional form (Walker and Skogerboe 1987):Conservation of mass (continuity):
Conservation of momentum:where Q is the discharge (m 3 s −1 ), A is the cross-sectional area of flow (m 2 ), x is the distance (m), t is time (s), I is the soil infiltration rate (m 3 m −2 s −1 ), y is the depth of flow (m), g is the acceleration due to gravity (m s −2 ) and S 0 and S f are the bed slope and friction slope (dimensionless), respectively. This single-dimensional representation is also often preferred for basin irrigation where the more theoretically correct twodimensional model encounters numerical stability issues. Throughout this paper, the soil intake rate per unit length of furrow, represented by I in the continuity equation (Eq. 1), is evaluated using the modified Kostiakov (Kostiakov-Lewis) function:This equation is more commonly expressed in terms of a cumulative infiltration, Z (m 3 m −2 ):where τ is the opportunity or ponding time (s), and a, k and f 0 are the empirical infiltration parameters, the values ofAbstract A model is described which applies the full one-dimensional version of the Saint-Venant equations for open channel flow to simulate the process of surface irrigation. The resulting software for surface irrigation simulation, calibration and optimisation, abbreviated to SISCO, was developed for use in a standard PC environment. Unlike some other models currently in use, SISCO can accommodate temporal variations in inflow rates and spatial variability in soil infiltration, surface roughness, slope and furrow geometry. The main focus of the paper is in regard to the calibration functionality, whereby it is capable of estimating the soil infiltration characteristic and Manning roughness from various combinations of practically obtainable field measurements.