Operational Monitoring of Daily Crop Water Requirements at the Regional Scale with Time Series of Satellite Data
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 4
Abstract
This work presents a simple, cost-effective, and operational approach to monitor crop water requirements at the regional scale for water management and monitoring purposes. The recommended Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations methodology (FAO-56) calculates crop evapotranspiration using crop-specific coefficients , which vary according to the crop type, health, and phenological stage. This approach, though widely applied for irrigation planning, cannot always match the appropriate crop coefficient with the actual crop phenological stage and health condition, especially in anomalous situations. Previous research demonstrated that crop coefficients and spectral vegetation indexes are correlated. Recent studies have used this relationship with high-resolution satellite data from different sensors to provide information to irrigation advisory services. However, high-resolution data are not feasible for an operational and routine monitoring of water consumption and needs. This paper tests the usefulness of time series of coarse resolution satellite data such as those collected by the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor, to monitor crop coefficients temporal and spatial variability and therefore crop water needs at the regional scale taking advantage of the peculiar characteristics offered by MODIS in terms of high temporal resolution and preprocessed products availability. The outlined methodology takes into account the actual growing stage of the crops and nearly real-time vegetation variations, overcoming some limitations of the traditional FAO approach while preserving the maximum operability. The analysis was carried out in the South Milan agricultural area on data referring to 2003 and 2004. The results agreed with those of other studies and proved to be able to account for the anomalous conditions of the summer in 2003. These results were then compared with those obtained using the traditional FAO crop coefficient curves built with data collected during field campaigns in the same years in rice fields. Constraints, limitations, and possible uses are discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
We like to thank the Est Sesia Consortium for the meteorological data provided, and the anonymous reviewers for the useful comments and suggestions.
References
Allen, R. G., Pereira, L. S., Raes, D., and Smith, M. (1998). “Crop evapotranspiration: Guidelines for computing crop water requirements.” FAO irrigation and drainage paper 56, Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome.
Bastiaanssen, W. G. M., Molden, D. J., and Makin, I. W. (2000). “Remote sensing for irrigated agriculture: Examples from research and possible applications.” Agric. Water Manage., 46, 137–155.
Bausch, W. C. (1993). “Soil background effects on reflectance-based crop coefficients for corn.” Remote Sens. Environ., 46(2), 213–222.
Bausch, W. C., and Neale, C. M. U. (1987). “Crop coefficient derived from reflected canopy radiation: A concept.” Trans. ASAE, 30(3), 703–709.
Bausch, W. C., and Neale, C. M. U. (1989). “Spectral inputs improve corn crop coefficients and irrigation scheduling.” Trans. ASAE, 32(6), 1901–1908.
Boschetti, M., et al. (2004). “Monitoring paddy rice crops through remote sensing: Productivity estimation by light use efficiency model.” Remote sensing for agriculture, ecosystems and hydrology, M. Owe, et al., eds., Proc. SPIE 5568, 46–56.
Calera, A., Jochum, A., García, A., Rodríguez, A., and Fuster, P. (2005). “Irrigation management from space: Towards user-friendly products.” Irrig. Drain. Syst., 19(3–4), 337–353.
Choudhury, B. J., Ahmed, N. U., Idso, S. B., Reginato, R. J., and Daughtry, C. S. T. (1994). “Relations between evaporation coefficients and vegetation indices studies by model simulations.” Remote Sens. Environ., 50, 1–17.
Confalonieri, R., Stroppiana, D., Boschetti, M., Gusberti, D., Bocchi, S., and Acutis, M. (2006). “Analysis of rice sample size variability due to development stage, nitrogen fertilization, sowing technique and variety using the visual jackknife.” Field Crops Res., 97, 135–141.
Courault, D., Seguin, B., and Olioso, A. (2005). “Review on estimation of evapotranspiration from remote sensing data: From empirical to numerical modeling approaches.” Irrig. Drain. Syst., 19, 223–249.
Devender Reddy, M., Krishna Murthy, I., Anand Reddy, K., and Venkatachari, A. (1980). “Consumptive use and daily evapotranspiration of corn under different levels of nitrogen and moisture regimes.” Plant Soil, 56(1), 143–147.
Duchemin, B., et al. (2006). “Monitoring wheat phenology and irrigation in Central Morocco: On the use of relationships between evapotranspiration, crops coefficients, leaf area index and remotely-sensed vegetation indices.” Agric. Water Manage., 79, 1–27.
Er-Raki, S., Chehbouni, A., Guemouria, N., Duchemin, B., Ezzahar, J., and Hadria, R. (2007). “Combining FAO-56 model and ground-based remote sensing to estimate water consumptions of wheat crops in a semi-arid region.” Agric. Water Manage., 87(1), 41–54.
Gonzalez-Piqueras, J., Calera, A., Gilabert, M. A., Cuestas, A., and De la Cruz Tercero, F. (2004). “Estimation of crop coefficients by means of optimized vegetation indices for corn.” Remote Sensing for Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Hydrology, V. M. Owe, et al., eds., Proc. SPIE, 5232, 110–118.
Gowda, P. H., Chavez, J. L., Colaizzi, P. D., Evett, S. R., Howell, T. A., and Tolk, J. A. (2008). “ET mapping for agricultural water management: Present status and challenges.” Irrig. Sci., 26, 223–237.
Hargreaves, G. H. (1994). “Defining and using reference evapotranspiration.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 120(6), 1132–1139.
Hargreaves, L. G., Hargreaves, G. H., and Riley, J. P. (1985). “Irrigation water requirements for Senegal river basin.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 111(3), 265–275.
Heilman, J. L., Heilman, W. E., and Moore, D. G. (1982). “Evaluating the crop coefficient using spectral reflectance.” Agron. J., 74, 967–971.
Hunsaker, D. J., Barnes, E. M., Clarke, T. R., Fitzgerald, G. J., and Pinter, P. J., Jr. (2005a). “Cotton irrigation scheduling using remotely sensed and FAO-56 basal crop coefficients.” Trans. ASAE, 48(4), 1395–1407.
Hunsaker, D. J., Pinter, P. J., Jr., and Kimball, B. A. (2005b). “Wheat basal crop coefficients determined by normalized difference vegetation index.” Irrig. Sci., 24(1), 1–14.
Jackson, R. D., and Huete, A. R. (1991). “Interpreting vegetation indices.” Prev. Vet. Med., 11, 185–200.
Jara, J., Stockle, C. O., and Kjelgaard, J. (1998). “Measurement of evapotranspiration and its components in a corn (Zea Mays L.) field.” Agric. Forest Meteorol., 92(2), 131–145.
Jonsson, P., and Eklundh, L. (2002). “Seasonality extraction and noise removal by function fitting to time-series of satellite sensor data.” IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 40, 1824–1832.
Kang, S., Gu, B., Du, T., and Zhang, J. (2003). “Crop coefficient and ratio of transpiration to evapotranspiration of winter wheat and maize in a semi-humid region.” Agric. Forest Meteorol., 59, 239–254.
Li, Y. H., and Cui, Y. L. (1996). “Real-time forecasting of irrigation water requirements of paddy fields.” Agric. Water Manage., 31(3), 185–193.
McBean, E., and Motiee, H. (2008). “Assessment of impact of climate change on water resources: A long term analysis of the Great Lakes of North America.” Hydrology Earth Syst. Sci., 12, 239–255.
Neale, C. M. U., Bausch, W. C., and Heermann, D. F. (1989). “Development of reflectance-based crop coefficients for corn.” Trans. ASAE, 32(6), 1891–1899.
Neale, C. M. U., Ahmed, R. H., Moran, M. S., Pinter, P. J., Jr., Qi, J., and Clarke, T. R. (1996). “Estimating seasonal cotton evapotranspiration using canopy reflectance.” Proc., Int. Conf. on Evapotranspiration and Irrigation Scheduling, C. R. Camp et al., eds., ASAE, St. Joseph, Mich., 173–181.
Neale, C. M. U., Jayanthi, H., and Wright, J. L. (2005). “Irrigation water management using high resolution airborne remote sensing.” Irrig. Drain. Syst., 19, 321–336.
Press, W. H., Teukolsky, S. A., Vetterling, W. T., and Flannery, B. P. (1992). Numerical recipes in C: The art of scientific computing, 2nd Ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Rafn, E. B., Contor, B., and Ames, D. P. (2008). “Evaluation of a method for estimating irrigated crop-evapotranspiration coefficients from remotely sensed data in Idaho.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 134(6), 722–729.
Rana, G., and Katerji, N. (2000). “Measurement and estimation of actual evapotranspiration in the field under Mediterranean climate: A review.” Eur. J. Agron., 13(2–3), 125–153.
Sakamoto, T., Yokozawa, M., Toritani, H., Shibayama, M., Ishizuka, N., and Ohno, H. (2005). “A crop phenology detection method using time-series MODIS data.” Remote Sens. Environ., 96, 366–374.
Savitzky, A., and Golay, M. J. E. (1964). “Smoothing and differentiation of data by simplified least squares procedures.” Anal. Chem., 36, 1627–1639.
Stegman, E. C., Musick, J. T., and Stewart, J. I. (1980). “Irrigation water management.” Design and operation of farm irrigation systems, M. E. Jensen, ed., ASAE, St. Joseph, Mich., 763–816.
Tasumi, M., Allen, R. G., and Trezza, R. (2006). “Calibrating satellite based vegetation indices to estimate evapotranspiration and crop coefficients.” Proc., USCID Water Management Conf., Boise, Id.
Temesgen, B., Eching, S., Davidoff, B., and Frame, K. (2005). “Comparison of some reference evapotranspiration equations for California.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 131(1), 73–84.
Trajkovic, S. (2005). “Temperature-based approaches for estimating reference evapotranspiration.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 131(4), 316–323.
Trajkovic, S. (2007). “Hargreaves versus Penman-Monteith under humid conditions.” J. Irrig. Drain. Eng., 133(1), 38–42.
Vermote, E. F., and Vermeulen, A. (1999). “Atmospheric correction algorithm: spectral reflectances (MOD09)—Version 4.0.” MODIS algorithm theoretical basis document, NASA, Washington, D.C.
Vermote, E. F., et al. (1997). “Atmospheric correction of visible to middle infrared EOS-MODIS data over land surface, background, operational algorithm and validation.” J. Geophys. Res., 102(14), 17131–17141.
Vogt, J., Niemeyer, S., and Viau, A. A. (2001). “Monitoring water stress at regional scales.” Proc,. 23rd Canadian Symp. on Remote Sensing, Laval University, Ste. Qué., 315–321.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 136 • Issue 4 • April 2010
Pages: 225 - 231
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Oct 27, 2008
Accepted: Aug 18, 2009
Published online: Mar 15, 2010
Published in print: Apr 2010
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.