The growing threat of drought and rising water demand have made accurate forecasts of crop water use critical for farmland water management and sustainability.
The growing threat of drought and rising water demand have made accurate forecasts of crop water use critical for farmland water management and sustainability.
But limitations in existing models and satellite data pose challenges for precise estimates of evapotranspiration — a combination of evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants. The process is complex and difficult to model, and existing remote-sensing data can’t provide accurate, high-resolution information on a daily basis.
A new high-resolution mapping framework called BESS-STAIR promises to do just that, around the globe. BESS-STAIR is composed of a satellite-driven biophysical model integrating plants’ water, carbon and energy cycles — the Breathing Earth System Simulator (BESS) — with a generic and fully automated fusion algorithm called STAIR (SaTellite dAta IntegRation).
The framework, developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was tested in 12 sites across the U.S. Corn Belt, and its estimates have achieved the highest performance reported in any academic study so far.
Read more at University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign Institute For Sustainability, Energy, And Environment. Image Credit: University Of Illinois
