Jacopo Dari
Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Perugia
Sessions
Water resources are essential for agricultural, industrial, and domestic uses, ensuring high standards of living. Among these, agriculture accounts for the vast majority of global water ab-stractions, far surpassing the uses referring to other sectors. Par-adoxically, it remains one of the least understood. Detailed, ex-plicit information on irrigation practices is still largely unavaila-ble or inadequately monitored at the global scale. In recent years, Earth Observation (EO) technologies have opened up new possibilities for monitoring irrigation dynamics, both in detect-ing irrigation occurrence in space and time and in quantifying the volumes of water used. This work presents recent advances in monitoring irrigation dynamics through innovative satellite-based approaches: the TSIMAP (Temporal-Stability-derived Irri-gation MAPping) method, aimed at mapping irrigated areas us-ing satellite data, and the Soil Moisture (SM)-based inversion approach, which estimates irrigation water use. TSIMAP is a versatile methodology, successfully applied across various cli-matic regions and at different spatial resolutions. The SM-based approach, on the other hand, has enabled the creation of the first-ever high-resolution datasets of irrigation water use an im-portant step for evaluating the hydrological impact of irrigation. Recently, this method has also been implemented operationally, demonstrating its potential for building satellite-based agricul-tural water monitoring systems. Along with results from the methodologies above, this contribution will also focus on future challenges in the field of irrigation monitoring from space.