Estimating actual irrigation application by remotely sensed evapotranspiration observations

Water managers and policy makers need accurate estimates of real (actual) irrigation applications for effective monitoring of irrigation and efficient irrigation management. However, this information is not readily available at field level for larger irrigation areas. An innovative inverse modeling approach was tested for a field in an irrigation scheme in southern Spain where observed actual evapotranspiration by satellites was used to assess irrigation application amounts. The actual evapotranspiration was used as the basis for an optimization procedure using the physical based SWAP model and the parameter optimization tool PEST. To evaluate the proposed techniques two steps were taken. First, actual observed evapotranspiration from remote sensing was used to optimize two parameters of the SWAP model to determine irrigation applications. Second, a forward–backward approach was applied to test the minimum overpass return time of satellites and the required accuracy of remotely sensed actual evapotranspiration for accurate assessment of irrigation applications. Results indicate that irrigation application amounts can be estimated reasonably accurately, providing data are available at an interval of 15 days or shorter and the accuracy of the signal is 90% or higher.