The United States Geological Survey Water Resources Research Act Program: Grant Details for Project 2008NE171B

Details for Project ID 2008NE171B

Satellite-based Energy Balance to Assess Riparian Water Use

Institute: Nebraska
Year Established: 2008 Start Date: 2008-03-01 End Date: 2009-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $19,995 Total Non-Federal Funds: $40,044

Principal Investigators: Ayse Irmak, Gary Hergert, Sunil Narumalani, Donald Rundquist, Gary Stone

Project Summary: Water is the most important constraint facing agriculture in the most of the Central High Plains of the U.S.A., including Nebraska. In the last few years, restrictions have been imposed on Natural Resources Districts (NRD) due to provisions in Supreme Court Settlements for litigation involving the Republican and Platte Rivers. These settlements requires a need to study the impact of riparian vegetation on streamflow depletion to better understand and quantify beneficial and unbeneficial water that result in managing limited water resources in the basins. Our goal is to improve our ability to estimate riparian evapotranspiration (ET) by utilizing satellite and air-bone remote sensing data on major watersheds in the North Platte River. A physically surface energy balance model, METRICTM (Mapping Evapotranspiration at high Resolution using Internalized Calibration), will be used to calculate ET from Satellite remote sensing. Specific objectives of the proposal are to (1) quantify daily, seasonal, and annual distributions of ET over riparian systems at selected watersheds along the North Platte River Basin in Nebraska, and (2) compare water use and water availability on riparian species by utilizing ET maps with existing air-bone based riparian species distribution map. The outcome of this work would be quantitative surface energy balance algorithm for land estimates of ET for riparian systems. We will provide calibrated remote sensing ET methodology, and predicted ET along North Platte River. We will develop guidelines on riparian water use which will be of benefit to the state, particularly with regard to riparian control for water acclamation.