When water is scarce, keeping food on the table is an act of balancing. This new application will help.

Imagine that you are a CEO without a clear picture of one of the most important raw materials of your company. This is the current situation of water managers and farmers in the western United States and there is an additional complication:

In many cases, water resources are becoming increasingly scarce as a result of more severe droughts overloaded by climate change. The future of communities, agriculture and wildlife is in balance.

In the western United States, crops and landscapes consume most of the water resources. However, monitoring consumption is surprisingly complex and costly, creating a huge gap in the data that water managers need to balance water resources and water requirements.

An innovative solution rooted in space

A recently announced web application called OpenET aims to fill this gap, so that farmers and water managers can create more resilient water sources across the West and ensure a safer food supply for our entire country.

OpenET combines developments in cloud computing with satellite imagery and scientifically created models to make crop data and vegetation water widely accessible for the first time to farmers and water managers.

The development of this groundbreaking platform is led by NASA, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Desert Research Institute and web developer Habitat Seven, with in-kind support from the Google Earth Engine.

The team also includes scientists from the US Geological Survey, the US Department of Agriculture, the University of Monterey Bay in California and many other universities, and nearly 100 farmers and water managers in the West.

The science behind data: What is ET?

“ET” in OpenET means evaporation, the process by which water returns to the atmosphere by evaporation from the earth’s surface and by plants.

Essentially it can be considered as the opposite of rainfall. For farmers and water managers, ET is an important measure of the water consumed by crops and vegetation, and can also be used to better understand how much water a crop actually uses to grow.

Farmers are already adopting data and technology to manage their fields up to square meters by monitoring plant health, fertilizer use, soil moisture and estimated crop yields in real time.

OpenET will provide just as important information about the near-real-time water consumption of your crops on a daily, monthly, and annual basis up to field level. When integrated into irrigation planning or other farm management tools, this data will allow farmers to make more informed management decisions, create more accurate water budgets and maximize “drop crops”.

Responsible for ensuring that cities, communities and farmers have the water they need, local water managers are also eager for this data to help them design innovative water conservation or trade programs that make farms and communities more resilient. in drought.

Without OpenET, the difficulty of measuring changes in water use resulting from new applications or technologies has prevented the creation of such programs.

Providing data to more farmers

Technology-savvy farmers and farm businesses in the West already use ET data. For example, Oregon State Representative Mark Owens, who owns or manages 3,200 acres of farmland, has designed more efficient irrigation systems based on ET measurements. As a result, it reduced groundwater abstraction by about 15% and related electricity costs by about 20%.

Despite its clear value, only about 7% of U.S. farmers were able to use ET data to manage irrigation, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study in 2018. This is largely due to the difficulty of accessing timely and accurate information on ET on an individual farm scale.

OpenET will give all farmers in the western US access to ET data that can benefit their outcome.

Innovative ways to tackle water scarcity

The OpenET project also aims to bring together farmers and water managers to develop more innovative solutions to water problems.

Eric Averett, managing director of the Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage Area in Bakersfield, California, the state groundwater zero point, uses OpenET data in a new online accounting and marketing platform that will allow its owners to control their water. balances as they would see in an online bank account.

Averett believes that OpenET will become the “de facto” source of water data due to the strong staff of project experts and the rigorous science behind the platform.

In Colorado, meanwhile, where more than half the state is experiencing extreme drought, a group of farmers will use OpenET in combination with ground measurements to more closely monitor water savings from new pasture irrigation practices. Such savings are critical in many areas of the West facing further water shortages.

Even before the release of OpenET in the western United States next year, it has attracted interest from other countries such as Brazil and Mexico, boosting the group’s plans to eventually expand to other regions.

This interest also underscores the need for more sophisticated management tools and strategies if we are to have enough water for humans and wildlife for future generations. OpenET will be one of these vital tools.