Water requirements for irrigated crops in semi-arid region in Jordan using sentinel satellite images

Abstract

The agricultural sector consumes most of the groundwater in Jordan, and Mujib basin is one of the most important available ground basins. Unsupervised classification has been applied on multitemporal satellite image for an arid region such as Mujib basin in order to identify the types of irrigated agricultural crops present in it, where it consisted of vegetables, field crops and fruit trees. Then find the reference evapotranspiration values and estimate crop coefficient values for each crop to calculate the water requirements of irrigated crops in order to find the quantities of water consumption in the basin which amounted to 29.7 million cubic meters. Where area of irrigated crops reached about 59 km2, which represents 1% of the total basin area and its concentrated in the northern and eastern regions, while rainfed agricultural activity was found in the western part of the basin. Vegetables are consumed high quantities of water, especially summer ones. Where this water is invaluable, and its importance will increase greatly soon as a result of high evaporation rates and scarcity of water resources in the region besides presence the political conflicts on these water resources. The classification of lands using multitemporal images from Sentinel satellite led to obtain more accurate results about the irrigated agricultural crops in terms of cultivation dates, duration, harvest time, monitoring the crop, determining its type and calculating its area.