Irrigation Potential Utilization Estimation using Time-Series Satellite Data

Abstract

In India, significant irrigation potential has been created to increase the agricultural crop intensity and its production. However, these irrigation systems, built with huge financial investments, exhibit significant gap in potential created and utilized. The contributing factors are multi fold and State & Central Governments initiated many programs to bridge the gap in irrigation potential created & utilized under command areas. Objective assessment of actual irrigation utilization in command areas is prerequisite for planning appropriate interventions to bridge the gap. Conventional field-based data collection mechanism is tedious and do not provide spatial patterns of irrigation utilization. Satellite data with multi-spectral and temporal dimensionality provides opportunities to estimate irrigation utilization and thus to derive its spatial patterns quantifying the gap between created and utilized. In this study, the irrigation potential utilized, as against the potential created was analyzed for Krishna basin using multi-temporal satellite data. Seasonal and annual crop map was derived from times series Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) data through unsupervised classification. The crop area identified from the remote sensed information was separated into irrigated and rainfed classes based on temporal profiles of Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) with in a crop season. Irrigation Potential Utilized (IPU) was determined as the gross irrigated area. https://doi.org/10.23953/cloud.ijarsg.475