Articles | Volume 28, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-441-2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-441-2024
Research article
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06 Feb 2024
Research article | Highlight paper |  | 06 Feb 2024

An inter-comparison of approaches and frameworks to quantify irrigation from satellite data

Søren Julsgaard Kragh, Jacopo Dari, Sara Modanesi, Christian Massari, Luca Brocca, Rasmus Fensholt, Simon Stisen, and Julian Koch

Data sets

Regional data sets of high-resolution (1 and 6 km) irrigation estimates from space (1.0) [Data set] Jacopo Dari et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7341284

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Executive editor
Freshwater is a precious commodity for mankind, and irrigation is one of the largest component of freshwater usage by mankind. Many uncertainties exist in determining the amount of freshwater usage for irrigation. This manuscript discusses various ways to quantify irrigation and application of remote sensing to assess irrigation fluxes. With future, high-resolution remote sensing platforms becoming available, this work will be helpful to develop application pertaining to irrigation quantification especially is drought affected and semi-arid regions of the world.
Short summary
This study provides a comparison of methodologies to quantify irrigation to enhance regional irrigation estimates. To evaluate the methodologies, we compared various approaches to quantify irrigation using soil moisture, evapotranspiration, or both within a novel baseline framework, together with irrigation estimates from other studies. We show that the synergy from using two equally important components in a joint approach within a baseline framework yields better irrigation estimates.