@beranes This illustrates the difficulty in accurately converting a volume rate to a linear application rate. In theory, if you measure the wet area under each emitter (and it was the same every time) you could use area to calculate the apparent linear rate (here, precip rate) with this equation:
Of course, that is a hard thing to do with an emitter with variable area, as you point out. With a system built around linear rates like ours, some guess-and-check tuning is inevitable. Your and others’ contribution to this discussion really has me thinking about how to offer a drip-specific mode where the schedule is determined by volume delivered, since the benchmarks and heuristics for drip irrigation are in volumes.
We would still do the math to tie the requested volume to (crop + shade-adjusted) ET, whether a customer would want it driven by ET (like turf zones) or simply wants an ET benchmark to compare to.