Model: Crop Irrigation Consumptive Water-Use Model

Model ID: wu-irrigation-cu

On This Page:

• Identification Information
• Entity and Attribute Information
• Explore Further - Analyses and Findings

Identification Information:

Citation:

Citation Information:

Originator:U.S. Geological Survey

Publication Date:2025

Title:USGS National Water Availability Assessment Data Companion website

Geospatial Data Presentation Form:Digital datasets

Online Linkage:https://water.usgs.gov/nwaa-data/data-file-directory?path=data/water-use/wu-irrigation-cu/

Larger Work Citation(s):

Citation Information:

Originator:Martin, D.J., Regan, R.S., Haynes, J.V., Read, A.L., Henson, W.R., Stewart, J.S., Brandt, J.T., and Niswonger, R.G.

Publication Date:2024-09-26

Title:Irrigation water use reanalysis for the 2000-20 period by HUC12, month, and year for the conterminous United States (ver. 2.0, September 2024)

Geospatial Data Presentation Form:Digital datasets

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.5066/P9YWR0OJ

Publisher:U.S. Geological Survey – ScienceBase

Citation Information:

Originator:Martin, D. J., Niswonger, R. G., Regan, R. S., Huntington, J., Ott, T., Morton, C., Senay, G. B., Friedrichs, M., Melton, F. S., Haynes, J., Henson, W., Read, A., Xie, Y., Lark, T., & Rush, M.

Publication Date:2025-07-25

Title:Estimating irrigation consumptive use for the conterminous United States: coupling satellite-sourced estimates of actual evapotranspiration with a national hydrologic model

Geospatial Data Presentation Form:Digital datasets

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2025.133909

Publisher:Journal of Hydrology

Description:

Name:Crop Irrigation Consumptive Water-Use Model

Model ID:wu-irrigation-cu

Summary:

This model computes the amount of water consumed for crop irrigation each month over the period from 2000 to 2020 for all subwatersheds (12-digit Hydrologic Unit Codes or HUC12s) in the conterminous United States (CONUS).

Irrigation consumptive use is defined as the amount of water removed from a surface-water body or aquifer that was used to grow crops and was lost to evapotranspiration; it excludes rain and snow directly on agricultural fields that contributed to evapotranspiration. Thus, irrigation consumptive use defined here is assumed equal to the amount of crop evapotranspiration that is sourced from irrigation water. To estimate irrigation consumptive use, this model combines maps of irrigated lands, satellite-sourced energy balance model estimates of evapotranspiration, and a process-based hydrologic model.

Technical Description:

A national model was developed to estimate consumptive use from actual evapotranspiration (ETa) using the Operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance Model (SSEBop) and the USGS National Hydrologic Model (NHM). These component models were combined with annual irrigation location data from the Landsat Irrigation Dataset (LANID) to enable national estimation of satellite-sourced ETa, consumptive use, and irrigation withdrawals from source-water. This current description focuses on the estimation of consumptive use, and the estimation of withdrawals is described elsewhere.

Landsat Collection 2 data were used to calculate ETa with the open-source SSEBop model within the OpenET framework using the Google Earth Engine Python application programming interface. ETa was estimated at 30m spatial resolution for all irrigated pixels in the CONUS as defined by the LANID irrigation status product. ETa is calculated using the fraction of reference ET, according to equations described in Martin et al. (2025) (in the citation list here).

Daily time series of ETa, reference ET, and other climate variables required by the NHM were spatially averaged over LANID irrigated land areas and subsequently summarized for each spatial unit, or hydrologic response unit (HRU), in the NHM.

ETa was used as a target for irrigated lands in the NHM. The NHM was used to estimate the daily applied water on the irrigated portion of each model unit using an iterative solution procedure to resolve nonlinearities between applied irrigation, soil moisture, and ETa. This procedure determines the amount of water that must be applied to irrigated fields such that the NHM-simulated ETa equals the satellite-sourced SSEBop target ETa. Consumptive use for the irrigated area of each NHM HRU is estimated using a soil water balance and the assumption that the proportion of ETa satisfied by irrigation verses precipitation is proportional to their relative amounts in storage and added during each time step. This assumption provides a method to separate irrigation consumptive use and effective precipitation. As a final step, consumptive use estimates provided by the NHM were disaggregated to HUC12s using area weighted intersections with HRUs and the relative proportion of irrigated lands in each intersected area.

See Martin et al. (2025) in the citation list to learn more about the technical details and find references to all component datasets and models.

Understanding the units (millions of gallons per day)

Monthly mean irrigation values were derived as the sum of predicted daily values (in millions of gallons) over the month divided by the number of days in the month, with resulting units of millions of gallons per day. Annual mean values were derived by multiplying monthly mean values by the respective number of days in the month, summing those over the 12 months in each year, and then dividing by the number of days in each year, with resulting units of millions of gallons per day. Leap years were accounted for in these calculations.

Variables:

Variable:

Name:Crop irrigation total consumptive use

Variable ID:irrcutot

Time Period of Content:

Time Period Information:

Range of Dates/Times:

Start Year/Month:200001

End Year/Month:202012

Status:

Scenario:Historical

Spatial Domain:

Description of Geographic Extent:Lower 48 United States

Bounding Coordinates:

West Bounding Coordinate:-126.0

East Bounding Coordinate:-66.2

North Bounding Coordinate:49.7

South Bounding Coordinate:24.4

Geospatial Data Needed to Map Output:

Description of Spatial Resolution:12-digit hydrologic unit codes

Citation Information:

Title:October 2020 version of the Watershed Boundary Dataset

Online Linkage:https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/67082a0fd34e969edc5a1cca

Entity and Attribute Information:

Detailed Description:

Entity Type:

Entity Type Label:combined_wu-irrigation-cu_historical_CONUS_200001-202012_long.csv

Entity Type Definition:

Comma Separated Value (CSV) file containing data for each of this model's variables for the 2000-2020 period by 12-digit hydrologic unit code (HUC12), month, and year for the Lower 48 United States. The first row is a header row and the data start on the second row. The first column is the HUC12 identifier (huc12_id) and the second column is the year and month (year_month). All following columns represent a variable, named by the variable ID followed by the units (e.g., irrcutot_mgd).

Entity Type Definition Source:Producer defined

Explore Further - Analyses and Findings:

National Water Availability Assessment Report Chapter(s):

Chapter:

Title:Chapter A: Executive Summary

Description:

Chapter A introduces the National Water Availability Assessment and provides important background and definitions for how the report characterizes water availability and its components. This chapter also presents the key findings of Chapters B-F and thus acts as a summary of the entire report. The sidebars presented in Chapter A provide context for the datasets and citations that are used throughout the report.

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1894A

Chapter:

Title:Chapter D: National Water Use

Description:

Chapter D (Medalie and others, 2025) assesses water use, including withdrawals and consumptive use in the conterminous United States (lower 48 states; CONUS). This chapter presents information on where, when, how much, and for what purpose surface and ground water are used in CONUS. This chapter focuses on analysis of the three types of water use that account for approximately 90% of water withdrawals in CONUS –public supply, crop irrigation, and thermoelectric power – but also includes information on other water use categories.

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1894D

Chapter:

Title:Chapter F: Integrated Water availability

Description:

The National Water Availability Assessment Report culminates with Chapter F (Stets and others, 2025), which is an integrated assessment of water availability. A comprehensive description of water availability requires consideration of multiple aspects, such as the amount and conditions of water (quantity and quality), along with the sensitivity of users to those conditions. This chapter uses information from the assessments of water supply, quality, and use to create a more integrated investigation of water availability across CONUS. This investigation includes the use of an index referred to as the surface water-supply and use index (SUI), which determines the relative stress from potential imbalances between water supply and water use.

Online Linkage:https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1894F