Evaluation of remotely sensed actual evapotranspiration data for modeling small scale irrigation in Ethiopia.
Abstract
The research presented in this paper is conducted in Ethiopia, which is located in the horn of Africa. Ethiopian economy largely depends on rainfed agriculture, which employs 80% of the labor force. The rainfed agriculture is frequently affected by droughts and dry spells. Small scale irrigation is considered as the lifeline for the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia. Biophysical models are highly used to determine the agricultural production, environmental sustainability, and socio-economic outcomes of small scale irrigation in Ethiopia. However, detailed spatially explicit data is not adequately available to calibrate and validate simulations from biophysical models. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was setup using finer resolution spatial and temporal data. The actual evapotranspiration (AET) estimation from the SWAT model was compared with two remotely sensed data, namely the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS). The performance of the monthly satellite data was evaluated with correlation coefficient (R2) over the different land use groups. The result indicated that over the long term and monthly the AVHRR AET captures the pattern of SWAT simulated AET reasonably well, especially on agricultural dominated landscapes. A comparison between SWAT simulated AET and AVHRR AET provided mixed results on grassland dominated landscapes and poor agreement on forest dominated landscapes. Results showed that the AVHRR AET products showed superior agreement with the SWAT simulated AET than MODIS AET. This suggests that remotely sensed products can be used as valuable tool in properly modeling small scale irrigation.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.H13C1403T
- Keywords:
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- 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1834 Human impacts;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1879 Watershed;
- HYDROLOGY