Vapour-pressure deficit the plant may dry out and die. For this reason the ideal range for VPD in a greenhouse is from 0.45 kPa to 1.25 kPa, ideally sitting at around 0.85 kPa. As a general rule, most plants grow well at VPDs of between 0.8 and 0.95 kPa. In ecology, it is the difference between the actual water vapour pressure and the saturation water vapour pressure at a particular temperature. Unlike relative humidity, vapour-pressure deficit has a simple nearly straight-line relationship to the rate of evapotranspiration and other measures of evaporation. To compute the VPD, we need the ambient (greenhouse) air
Vapour pressure of water it is more complicated to use. The Buck equation is even superior to the more complex Goff-Gratch equation over the range needed for practical meteorology. For serious computation, Lowe (1977) developed two pairs of equations for temperatures above and below freezing, with different levels of accuracy. They are all very accurate (compared to Clausius-Clapeyron and the Goff-Gratch) but use nested polynomials for very efficient computation. However, there are more recent reviews of possibly superior formulations, notably Wexler (1976, 1977), reported by Flatau et al. (1992). Vapour pressure of water The vapour pressure of water is the pressure at which water