Assessing the feasibility of applying remote sensing technique in calculating water consumption

Abstract

Remote sensing techniques are currently used in different fields including irrigation and water management fields. One of the important fields is the calculation of water consumption (WC). Remote sensing techniques can be used to estimate actual evapotranspiration and it can also be used to estimate crop coefficients based on spectral reflectance of vegetation indices (VIs), and from a relation with normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which is an indicator for the absorption and the reflection ratios by the green plant. The current study used remote sensing data to calculate WC for El-Bostan irrigation district. Crop coefficient values were calculated from NDVI and reference evapotranspiration values were calculated using CROPWAT program. The obtained results were verified by comparing them with field measurements. There was a strong linear correlation between the measured and calculated values with r2 of 0.90, while the root-mean-square error (RMSE) was 0.68. The results were also verified by comparing irrigation efficiencies obtained from remote sensing and from field measurements. The results were very close to each other. The study illustrated the importance and the reliability of using remote sensing techniques in calculating WC values, and which could improve water management and water use efficiency.