Title: Dynamics of Water Use through Multi-scale Water Accounting

Authors: Kaleem Ullah, Mohsin Hafeez, Yann Chemin, Josh Sixsmith

Abstract:

Irrigated agriculture is a major consumer of fresh water wordwide, but a large part of the
irrigation water is inefficiently used due to poor management of irrigation systems. To
remedy this, decision makers want to have knowledge about low water use efficiency
hotspots. Improving water management is the first priority to enhance the efficiency of
beneficial use of water which entails the complete understanding of spatial dynamics for
point (rainfall, surface water, and groundwater) estimates or spatially distributed
evapotranspiration (ET) data.

Actual ET is the overriding aspect affecting the water dynamics at farm to catchment scale.
Satellite remote sensing is a powerful tool to estimate ET over various spatial and temporal
scales. For improved irrigation system management, a holistic approach of integrating
remote sensing derived ET from SAM-ET (spatial algorithm for mapping ET), for Australian
agro-ecosystem, with spatial water accounting model was used to better understand the
spatial water dynamics in the Coleambally Irrigation Area (CIA) of the southern MDB. In
order to capture the spatial dynamics, CIA was divided into 22 nodes based on the direction
of flow and connectivity. All hydrological data of inflow and outflow at all nodes were
estimated. Accurate maps of various agriculture crops using high spatial resolution satellite
images (ALOS/AVNIR) were developed for each cropping season. Landsat 5 TM satellite
images were used to estimate seasonal actual ET and the results were compared with the
data obtained from Eddy Covariance flux towers installed in CIA.

Initial results are quite promising and provide good insights about the spatial water
dynamics for each farm, node and the whole system. Dynamic water use assessment is
being integrated into decision making maps to understand the low efficiency hotspots.
Thematic maps of water overuse/underuse will be prepared to make efficient decision at
different spatial scales.