Estimating Actual Evapotranspiration of Sugarcane by Remote Sensing. (A Case Study: Mirza Kochakkhan Sugarcane Agro-Industry Company Farms)

Precise estimate of evapotranspiration (ET) or crop water requirements crucial for improving water resources management and eventually increasing water use efficiency. Considering the vast varieties of crops cultivated on large scales, calculating precisely the crop water requirement from ordinary methods of estimating reference evapotranspiration is difficult and in some cases even impossible. Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods to compute crop water requirement in large areas with sufficient accuracy. One of such methods is to use remote sensing data which covers a much larger areas as compared with methods depending on field weather data. One of the most well known methods to compute actual ET from remote sensing data is SEBAL method (Surface Energy Balance Algorithm on Land). In SEBAL method, all fluxes of the energy balance at the earth's surface including net radiation, soil heat flux, and sensible heat flux are calculated from satellite images and finally actual ET is computed based on the energy balance at the earth's surface. It is intended to evaluate spatio-temporal variation of daily ET in Mirza Kochakkhan sugarcane Agro-Industry farms located in southern part of the Khosetan province using MODIS images for 10-day periods during a growing season in 2006-2007. The results obtained indicated that the SEBAL method was an efficient method to estimate actual ET during the growing season. Maps of actual ET generated by ERDAS and GIS software showed that fields which were well irrigated or had a good crop cover had the highest values of ET. However, actual ET decreased for areas with less crop cover or dry fields. The data obtained from the generated maps of actual ET were closer to the data obtained from the field with a coefficient of determination of R2=0.77.