Estimation of Water Requirement of Olive Orchards with Satellite Images (Case Study: Tarom)

Knowing water requirement or the actual amount of evapotranspiration for agricultural lands is an appropriate tool and technique for water resource management. Estimation of actual evapotranspiration from field observations is a time-consuming and difficult task. In this regard, remote sensing methods are powerful tools for the assessment of water consumption in a regional scale. In this study, MODIS (land bands 1-7, and thermal bands) and SEBAL algorithm were used to extract water requirement of olive in Tarom County from December 22, 2011 to August 23, 2013. Results from SEBAL algorithm were compared with Penman-Monteith method. Findings indicated that the root mean square error (RMSE) in the estimation of daily evapotranspiration by MODIS and Penman-Monteith method was 0.98.