Estimating regional agricultural water use based on remote sensing data: a case study at Luancheng County of North China Plain

Abstract

Sustainable management of water resources requires reliable information on regional evapotranspiration (ET) distribution, which is the largest output component of the hydrological cycle in North China Plain (NCP). In this work, we integrate a popular remote sensing technique with ArcGIS to build a ArcMap tool bar, named rOIS-ET, for estimating regional ET from Landsat TM/ETM+ data. The development of rGIS-ET enables quick processing of large amount of remote sensing and other spatial data. It also provides user-friendly interfaces for modeling, output display and result analyses. We use daily ET measurements from a weighting lysimeter in our experimental station to verify the performance of rGIS-ET. The verification confirms the reliability of ET calculation, whose errors during crop growing season are less than 10 %. We apply rGIS-ET to Luancheng County, a typical agricultural region in NCP, to demonstrate its utility for calculating regional ET and estimating agriculture water needs and ground water usage, both of which are critical to the design of an effective water resources management program for achieving sustainable development.