Dissertation
SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING-BASED ESTIMATION OF EVAPOTRANSPIRATION, CROP GROWTH AND YIELD
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2016
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/112098
Abstract
Evapotranspiration (ET) is the largest consumer of global fresh water resources and monitoring of actual ET (ETa) in heterogeneous soil-water conditions and land surface characteristics is a challenge. Since crop productivity is closely associated with transpiration thus ETa. Therefore, estimating crop growth and yields at large scales in non-homogenous land surface conditions is also challenging. This dissertation presented a solution for that problem. METRIC, a remote sensing model that estimates ETa from satellite images was evaluated in eastern Washington, representative of a vast dryland region of the US Inland Pacific Northwest (IPNW). The results of the ETa when compared against eddy covariance (EC) flux tower measurements in highly contrasting annual precipitation zones with different crops, revealed that METRIC can accurately estimate ETa in water-limited conditions. METRIC ETa provided the basis to develop a new methodology called RS-SCM (remote sensing based simple crop model). Where the remotely sensed LAI (leaf area index) and METRIC ETa was used to estimate crop growth and yields in eastern Washington. The RS-SCM was tested in dryland agricultural systems of the IPNW against the in-situ AGB (above ground biomass) measurements at different times from crop growth till harvest, and EC above ground net primary production (ANPP) calculations. The results showed that RS-SCM AGB agreed well with all in-situ measurements of AGB at various crop growth stages for all crops on the ground. The total biomass and harvested yields estimated by RS-SCM were also satisfactory when compared against the actual yields per hectare. The results of the analysis for three growing seasons from 2013 onward are presented. The analyses cover the following topics: a review of current methodologies to determine ETa, an overview of the methods used to estimate crop yields from remote sensing information, evaluation of METRIC for ETa estimation in IPNW typical dryland agricultural settings, the development and implementation of RS-SCM a simple model to estimate crop growth and yields from transpiration use efficiency and comparison of estimated crop growth and yields with in-situ measurements and EC tower flux calculations.
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Details
- Title
- SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING-BASED ESTIMATION OF EVAPOTRANSPIRATION, CROP GROWTH AND YIELD
- Creators
- Muhammad Azeem Khan
- Contributors
- Claudio O. Stӧckle (Advisor)Jennifer C. Adam (Committee Member)R. Troy Peters (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Biological Systems Engineering, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 121
- Identifiers
- 99900581631601842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation