New Satellite Based Mobile Application for Agriculture Water Tracking
Scientists at the University of Nebraska, Google and the University of Idaho in US, introduced an application called EEFLUX (Earth Engine Evapotranspiration Flux), which will allow anyone in the world to produce field-scale maps of water consumption. Application uses the METRIC ET process (thermally driven energy balance) as foundation. This operates on the Google Earth Engine and Computational Cloud.
EEFLUX will give you satellite images by allowing to check water-use maps in near real-time on any mobile device that has web access.
"The use of satellite imagery provides the means to monitor the agricultural water consumption over every square foot of land surface," said Ayse Kilic, a professor at the University of Nebraska.
That imagery comes from the Landsat satellites, whose thermal band data allows water specialists to measure the amount of water evaporating from the soil and transpiring from a plant's leaves - a process called evapotranspiration (ET).
The spatial resolution of Landsat's thermal imagery, combined with the Landsat data for other spectral bands, allows experts and farmers alike to see water consumption for individual fields.
Water managers can track the effectiveness of various water conservation projects with METRIC because it provides a new level of detail - from field to field, crop to crop, and year to year.
METRIC (ET) on Google Earth Engine
Gridded Weather data - used to calibrate EEFlux energy balance and to calculate Reference ET used for Time Interaction of ET.
- NLDAS - North American Land Data Assimilation System hourly weather data at 12 km available for > 30 year period
- GridMET - daily, bias corrected weather data at 4 km available for > 30 year period
- Climate Forecast System Version 2, 6-hourly Product (CSFV2)
- Real Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) - downloaded daily to Earth Engine - used to fill in time gaps between NLDAS and today for processing recent Landsat imagery
Soils - Used to produce a daily time series of evaporation from bare soil. Statsgo soils data is available for CONUS for top 0.15 m of soil. FAO soils data base used for rest of globe.
Source : University of Nebraska, University of Idaho and Google
EEFLUX will give you satellite images by allowing to check water-use maps in near real-time on any mobile device that has web access.
"The use of satellite imagery provides the means to monitor the agricultural water consumption over every square foot of land surface," said Ayse Kilic, a professor at the University of Nebraska.
That imagery comes from the Landsat satellites, whose thermal band data allows water specialists to measure the amount of water evaporating from the soil and transpiring from a plant's leaves - a process called evapotranspiration (ET).
The spatial resolution of Landsat's thermal imagery, combined with the Landsat data for other spectral bands, allows experts and farmers alike to see water consumption for individual fields.
Water managers can track the effectiveness of various water conservation projects with METRIC because it provides a new level of detail - from field to field, crop to crop, and year to year.
METRIC (ET) on Google Earth Engine
Gridded Weather data - used to calibrate EEFlux energy balance and to calculate Reference ET used for Time Interaction of ET.
- NLDAS - North American Land Data Assimilation System hourly weather data at 12 km available for > 30 year period
- GridMET - daily, bias corrected weather data at 4 km available for > 30 year period
- Climate Forecast System Version 2, 6-hourly Product (CSFV2)
- Real Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) - downloaded daily to Earth Engine - used to fill in time gaps between NLDAS and today for processing recent Landsat imagery
Soils - Used to produce a daily time series of evaporation from bare soil. Statsgo soils data is available for CONUS for top 0.15 m of soil. FAO soils data base used for rest of globe.
Source : University of Nebraska, University of Idaho and Google