Irrigation water use monitoring at watershed scale using series of high-resolution satellite images

A. Díaz; M. P. González-Dugo; S. Escuin; L. Mateos; F. Cano; V. Cifuentes; J. L. Tirado; N. Oyonarte

doi:10.1117/12.830371

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18 September 2009 Irrigation water use monitoring at watershed scale using series of high-resolution satellite images

A. Díaz, M. P. González-Dugo, S. Escuin, L. Mateos, F. Cano, V. Cifuentes, J. L. Tirado, N. Oyonarte

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Proceedings Volume 7472, Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XI; 74720E (2009) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.830371
Event: SPIE Remote Sensing, 2009, Berlin, Germany

Abstract

The integration of time series of high-resolution remote sensing images in the FAO crop evapotranspiration (ET) model is receiving growing interest in the last years, specially for operational applications in irrigated areas. In this study, a simplified methodology to estimate actual ET for these areas in large watersheds was developed. Then it was applied to the Guadalquivir river watershed (Southern Spain) in the 2007 and 2008 irrigation seasons. The evolution of vegetation indices, obtained from 10 Landsat and IRS images per season, was used for two purposes. Firstly, it was used for identifying crop types based on a classification algorithm. This algorithm used training data from a screened subset of the information declared by farmers for EU agriculture subsidies purposes. Secondly, the vegetation indices were used to obtain basal crop coefficients (K_cb, the component of the crop coefficient that represents transpiration). The last step was the parameterization of the influence of evaporation from the soil surface, considering the averaged effect of a given rain distribution and irrigation schedule. The results showed only small discrepancies between the crop coefficients calculated using the simplified model and those calculated based on a soil water balance and the dual approach proposed by FAO. Therefore, it was concluded that the simplified method can be applied to large irrigation areas where detailed information about soils and/or water applied by farmers lacks..

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A. Díaz, M. P. González-Dugo, S. Escuin, L. Mateos, F. Cano, V. Cifuentes, J. L. Tirado, and N. Oyonarte "Irrigation water use monitoring at watershed scale using series of high-resolution satellite images", Proc. SPIE 7472, Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology XI, 74720E (18 September 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.830371

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