Title: Spatial Quantification of Crop Water Stresses using Remote Sensing

Authors: Umair Rabbani, Mohsin Hafeez

Around 70% of all water used for agriculture in Australia is consumed by irrigation within
the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) and these water resources are under considerable
pressure due to over allocation of irrigation and land degradation over the past years.
Issues of soil salinization i.e. closely associated with the rise of groundwater tables are
risking the sustainability of irrigated food production before the recent drought. Enhanced
water use efficiency and refined water use practices are needed for irrigation to sustain in
the future.

The main objective of this study is to explore the possibility of spatially quantifying crop
stresses by applying remote sensing. Our aim is to assess the impact of groundwater
depth and salinity and soil salinity on crop productivity in the Coleambally irrigation Area
(CIA) located in the MDB.

Remote sensing provides representative measurements of several relevant physical

parameters at various spatial scales. SEBAL remote sensing model was applied to
estimate actual evapotranspiration (ET) using MODIS and Landsat data for year 2004 -
2005. Regression analysis was applied to develop two different models that can test the
significance of groundwater depth and salinity, and soil salinity on actual ET. Both linear
and non-linear structural forms of the regression models were applied.

The empirical findings using both MODIS and Landsat data consistently validated the
previous findings i.e. groundwater depth had a highly significant impact on ET. The
impact of soil and groundwater salinities on ET was not found significant using satellite
data. This may be due to data limitation as the soil and groundwater salinity survey in the
CIA is done every 3 years. Nevertheless, a consistent relationship was found between
groundwater depth and ET. The results showed that this relationship can be represented
by using Landsat since the spatially distributed data has the potential to capture more
variability.