Managing Water in Agriculture through Remote Sensing Applications

Abstract

The climatic factors and their variability, both spatial and temporal, linked to precipita-tion decreasing and irregular distribution, due to climatic changes, have been gathering a higher weight in the definition of water management policies. These policies have important implications on agriculture. Using new technologies that allow a better use of water requires institutional changes in major areas. The first point is the need for base information with an adequate spatial and temporal resolution. The work we have done includes itself in the water efficient and sustained use, allowing the improvement of irrigation systems and it’s the result of a jointly effort of several teams based on an international project. The PLEIADES Project - Participatory multi-Level EO-assisted tools for Irrigation water management: and Agricultural Decision - Support, falls in the 6th Framework Programme, Priority 6 - Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems – CEC - Research Directorate-General-Integrating and Strengthening the European Research Area. The Portuguese working area was the Caia irrigation area, a subsystem of Guadiana basin, located in the southeast of Portugal, near the border with Spain. The system praised by PLEIADES stands mainly over FAO normative, about culture water needs and the calculation of cultural coefficient (Kc) in a simple way, directly from remote sensing data. For that we simply use radiometric pa-rameters derived from visible and infrared bands.