SEBAL Model with Remotely Sensed Data to Improve Water-Resources Management under Actual Field Conditions
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 131, Issue 1
Abstract
Water management emphasis tends to shift from supply augmentation to limiting water consumption. Spatio-temporal information on actual evapotranspiration (ET) helps users to better understand evaporative depletion and to establish links between land use, water allocation, and water use. Satellite-based measurements, used in association with energy balance models, can provide the spatial distribution of ET for these linkages. This paper describes the major principles of the Surface Energy Balance Algorithm for Land (SEBAL) and summarizes its accuracy under several climatic conditions at both field and catchment scales. For a range of soil wetness and plant community conditions, the typical accuracy at field scale is 85% for and it increases to 95% on a seasonal basis. The accuracy of annual ET of large watersheds was found to be 96% on average. SEBAL has been applied in more than 30 countries worldwide, and the 26 research studies that were conducted over the past are now gradually being replaced by application studies (17 studies finished). A short case study in the Yakima River basin (Washington State) is presented as new material to demonstrate how ET from remote sensing can be used for evaluating water conservation projects.
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Acknowledgments
The global field measurements were made available by Wageningen University (Henk de Bruin and Wouter Meijninger), University of Idaho (Rick Allen), USDA (Jim Wright), Alterra (Eddy Moors and Pavel Kabat), Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (Fred Bosveld and Wim Kohsiek), the International Water Management Institute (Mobin-ud-Din Ahmad and Manju Hemkumara), Lanzhou Institute for Atmospheric Physics (Jiemin Wang), New Mexico Tech (Jan Hendrickx and James Cleverly), and the University of Colorado (Eric Small). The value of these efforts and data sets for validation of SEBAL are greatly appreciated.
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Published In
Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 131 • Issue 1 • February 2005
Pages: 85 - 93
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© 2005 ASCE.
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Received: Apr 23, 2003
Accepted: Jan 8, 2004
Published online: Feb 1, 2005
Published in print: Feb 2005
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