Combining Remotely Sensed Evapotranspiration and an Agroecosystem Model to Estimate Center-Pivot Irrigation Water Use at High Spatio-Temporal Resolution

Jingwen Zhang, Kaiyu Guan, Wang Zhou, Chongya Jiang, Bin Peng, Ming Pan, Robert F. Grant, Trenton E. Franz, Andrew Suyker, Yi Yang, Xiaohong Chen, Kairong Lin, Zewei Ma

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Estimating irrigation water use accurately is critical for sustainable irrigation and studying terrestrial water cycle in irrigated croplands. However, irrigation is not monitored in most places, and current estimations of irrigation water use has coarse spatial and/or temporal resolutions. This study aims to estimate irrigation water use at the daily and field scale through the proposed model-data fusion framework, which is achieved by particle filtering with two configurations (concurrent, CON, and sequential, SEQ) by assimilating satellite-based evapotranspiration (ET) observations into an advanced agroecosystem model, ecosys. Two types of experiments using synthetic and real ET observations were conducted to study the efficacy of the proposed framework for estimating irrigation water use at the irrigated fields in eastern and western Nebraska, United States. The experiments using synthetic ET observations indicated that, for two major sources of uncertainties of ET difference between observations and model simulations, which are bias and noise, noise had larger impacts on degrading the estimation performance of irrigation water use than bias. For the experiments using real ET observations, monthly and annual estimations of irrigation water use matched well with farmer irrigation records, with Pearson correlation coefficient (r) around 0.80 and 0.50, respectively. Although detecting daily irrigation records was very challenging, our method still gave a good performance with RMSE, BIAS, and r around 2.90, 0.03, and 0.4 mm/d, respectively. Our proposed model-data fusion framework for estimating irrigation water use at high spatio-temporal resolution could contribute to regional water management, sustainable irrigation, and better tracking terrestrial water cycle.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere2022WR032967
JournalWater Resources Research
Volume59
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2023

Keywords

  • agroecosystem model
  • data assimilation
  • evapotranspiration
  • irrigation water use
  • model-data fusion

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Water Science and Technology

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