Progress in Developing Scale-Able Approaches to Field-Scale Water Accounting Based on Remote Sensing

Rutger Willem Vervoort, Ignacio Fuentes, Joost Brombacher, Jelle Degen, Pedro Chambel-Leitão and Flávio Santos
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Rutger Willem Vervoort: Data Analytics for Resources and the Environment Industry Transformation Training Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Ignacio Fuentes: WaterTechnology Pty, Ltd., Notting Hill, VIC 3168, Australia
Joost Brombacher: eLEAF B.V., 6703CT Wageningen, The Netherlands
Jelle Degen: eLEAF B.V., 6703CT Wageningen, The Netherlands
Pedro Chambel-Leitão: Hidromod LDA, Porto Salvo, 2740-278 Lisboa, Portugal
Flávio Santos: Hidromod LDA, Porto Salvo, 2740-278 Lisboa, Portugal

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 5, 1-22

Abstract: To increase water productivity and assess water footprints in irrigated systems, there is a need to develop cheap and readily available estimates of components of water balance at fine spatial scales. Recent developments in satellite remote sensing platforms and modelling capacities have opened opportunities to address this need, such as those being developed in the WaterSENSE project. This paper showed how evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and farm-dam water volumes can be quantified based on the Copernicus data from the Sentinel satellite constellation. This highlights distinct differences between energy balance and crop factor approaches and estimates that can be derived from the point scale to the landscape scale. Differences in the results are related to assumptions in deriving evapotranspiration from remote sensing data. Advances in different parts of the water cycle and opportunities for crop detection and yield forecasting mean that crop water productivity can be quantified at field to landscape scales, but uncertainties are highly dependent on input data availability and reference validation data.

Keywords: water use efficiency; Copernicus satellite data; irrigated agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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