The integration of time series of high-resolution remote sensing images in the FAO crop evapotranspiration (ET) model is receiving growing interest in the last years, specially for operational applications in irrigated areas. In this study, a simplified methodology to estimate actual ET for these areas in large watersheds was developed. Then it was applied to the Guadalquivir river watershed (Southern Spain) in the 2007 and 2008 irrigation seasons. The evolution of vegetation indices, obtained from 10 Landsat and IRS images per season, was used for two purposes. Firstly, it was used for identifying crop types based on a classification algorithm. This algorithm used training data from a screened subset of the information declared by farmers for EU agriculture subsidies purposes. Secondly, the vegetation indices were used to obtain basal crop coefficients (K cb , the component of the crop coefficient that represents transpiration). The last step was the parameterization of the influence of evaporation from the soil surface, considering the averaged effect of a given rain distribution and irrigation schedule. The results showed only small discrepancies between the crop coefficients calculated using the simplified model and those calculated based on a soil water balance and the dual approach proposed by FAO. Therefore, it was concluded that the simplified method can be applied to large irrigation areas where detailed information about soils and/or water applied by farmers lacks.
The analysis of satellite images allows one to monitor the regeneration of vegetation after a fire. In this work, a methodology for quantifying post fire vegetation cover was developed. The proposed methodology is based on the examination of Landsat 7 ETM+ images by using Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA) and involves the following steps: a) pre-processing, b) inherent dimensionality image determination c) endmember characterization following two methods that thus lead to different models: traditional method based on the knowledge of the area worked as well as Minimum Noise Fraction and Pixel Purity Index method, d) model inversion and combination, e) comparison between the vegetation cover estimated by each model and that measured in field, and f) selection of the most accurate model and mapping of the vegetation cover for the study area. The cover estimated provided by the different models exhibited a high correlation (Spearman’s correlation coefficient >0.89). The average absolute difference between the estimated and field-measured vegetation cover obtained with the most accurate model for each fire never exceeded 6%.
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