Surface Energy Balance and Crop Coefficient Estimation with R

This R package computes and integrates surface energy balance into the FAO56 crop water balance model.

Specifically, the package can perform the following functions:

• Single crop coefficient modelling
• Dual crop coefficient modelling
• The integration of thermal-based Evaporative Fractions in a water balance model
• The computation of Two-Source Surface Energy Balance (TSEB) models such as TSEB-PT, TSEB-PM and TSEB-Parallel
• The computation of One-Source Surface Energy Balance (OSEB) models such as SEBAL, METRIC, SEBI, SSEB and SEBS

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN (recommended — dependencies are handled automatically):

install.packages("sebkc")

Or the development version from GitHub:

if (!require("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("gowusu/sebkc")

Documentation website

Full documentation — both manuals plus a reference for every function — is online at https://gowusu.github.io/sebkc/.

Manuals

Two manuals ship with the package — a plain-language guide and a full technical reference — with every number and figure produced by running the package.

Start here if you just want crop water numbers — How Much Water Does My Crop Need? A practical, jargon-free guide that states a real problem (how much to irrigate crops on farms near Kumasi) and walks through the answer for maize, tomato, cabbage, onion and pepper across the dry and main seasons, using the built-in Kumasi weather (kept up to date automatically):

• Read it online — on the documentation website
• Source on GitHub (Markdown) — renders in the repo
• manual/crop_water_needs.docx — Word version (Save As → PDF for a printable copy)
• manual/reproduce_water_needs.R — regenerates every table and figure

The full technical reference — Evapotranspiration from Weather and Satellites. Reference evapotranspiration and the FAO-56 crop-coefficient water balance, plus the satellite surface-energy-balance models (SEBAL, METRIC, SEBS, SEBI, SSEB, S-SEBI and the two-source TSEB), on the bundled Kumasi Landsat data:

• Read it online — on the documentation website
• Source on GitHub (Markdown) — renders in the repo
• manual/sebkc_manual.docx — Word version (Save As → PDF for a printable copy)
• manual/reproduce_manual.R — regenerates every table and figure

Citation

If you use sebkc in your work, please cite it. You can always get the current citation in R with:

citation("sebkc")

Owusu, G. (2026). sebkc: Surface Energy Balance and Crop Coefficient Evapotranspiration Estimation. R package version 1.0-6. https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.sebkc

BibTeX:

@Manual{sebkc,
  title  = {sebkc: Surface Energy Balance and Crop Coefficient Evapotranspiration Estimation},
  author = {George Owusu},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {R package version 1.0-6},
  doi    = {10.32614/CRAN.package.sebkc},
  url    = {https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.sebkc},
}

Links

• CRAN: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sebkc
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.sebkc

Author: George Owusu owusugeorge@ug.edu.gh. This is part of the author's PhD program.