Abstract
Climate change is having an adverse effect on the environment especially in sub-Sahara Africa, where capacity for natural resource management such as water is very low. The scope of the effect on land use types have to be estimated to inform proper remedy. A combined estimation of transpiration and evaporation from plants and soil is critical to determine annual water requirement for different land use. Evapotranspiration (ET) is a major component in the world hydrological cycle, and understanding its spatial dimensions is critical in evaluating the effects it has on regional land use. A measure of this component is challenging due to variation in rainfall and environmental changes. The mapping evapotranspiration with high resolution and internalized calibration (METRIC) method is employed to create evapotranspiration map for land use, using remotely sensed data by satellite, processed, and analyzed in ArcGIS. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was related to the availability of water for vegetation on different land use, and the results indicate a high evapotranspiration for vegetated land use with high NDVI than land use with low NDVI.
Highlights
Accurate estimate of evapotranspiration (ET) in agricultural communities in sub-Sahara Africa is important for the prudent use of water resources for agricultural purposes and the ever growing rural population [1]
Dataset. e data for the study came in two parts; the Landsat 8 products provided by the United States Geological Service (USGS) EROS Center and the packages contain all the supporting files and were processed for top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance by using radiometric rescaling coefficients with the product metadata file (MTL file). e satellite imagery downloaded was in 2015, with one on February 28 and the other on November 11, having eight month interval to capture most of the farming activities. ese were carefully selected owning to the excessive cloud cover in the study area throughout the year
Spatial and temporal distribution of evapotranspiration in five land use classes with their corresponding normalized difference vegetation index for each of the satellite imagery was analyzed. It indicates that evapotranspiration is directly proportional to the normalized difference vegetation index
Summary
Accurate estimate of evapotranspiration (ET) in agricultural communities in sub-Sahara Africa is important for the prudent use of water resources for agricultural purposes and the ever growing rural population [1]. E functioning stations instrument can estimate ET at a field scale and does not take into account the spatiotemporal distribution at the regional scale, which covers the surrounding farming communities [4, 5]. To overcome this challenge, remote sensing means of estimating ET has become the viable option, and over the past decades, several methods have been developed to estimate ETat local, regional, and global scale [6, 7]. Most of these models apply reflectance from remotely sensed imagery to compute ET as a residual of energy balance at the earth’s surface [8,9,10]
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