A NOVEL APPROACH TO REMOTE SENSING OF EVAPOTRANSPIRATION TO IMPROVE WATER USE EFFICIENCY ACROSS CROP PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

The Southwestern U.S. and many other arid and semiarid regions around the world face serious water shortages that are projected to have paramount adverse impacts on irrigated agriculture. While agriculture is one of the major consumers contributing to water scarcity, it has also the largest potential for conservation. In response to this global water crisis and the urgent need to sustainably secure and more efficiently use water to produce food, we aim to develop a transformative model for crop water consumption to provide decision support for farm-level precision irrigation management to increase water use efficiency while reducing detrimental environmental impacts due to over-irrigation.Within this context the specific objectives are to:Develop novel radiative transfer models for estimation of soil and plant canopy water content from soil- and top-of-canopy spectral reflectance and soil and plant optical properties.Combine the radiative transfer models with a novel physically based framework for estimation of plant transpiration.Develop a scaling algorithm to estimate actual evapotranspiration (i.e., crop water use) at the field-scale.The final product will be amenable for parametrization with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) observations.